Magnus Danielson wrote: >Indeed. This is useful for those believing in SI/TAI seconds for as the >second distance of time_t, their reference epoch is inconveniently >offset in this fashion, making them have an offset of 25,999918 s from >POSIX (right now - propper reference scale should be TAI).
Yes. >Those believing in rubber seconds up to 1972 and then SI/TAI seconds >from that will get the more convenient 10 s offset from 1 Jan 1972, >making them having an offset of 24 s from POSIX. No, if you're doing this then you must include the irregular leap. The current offset is about 24.107757997 s, and does not have a terminating decimal representation. (This is the counting-UTC-seconds way.) I believe some people do do the 24 s offset that you suggest, however. I think it's through ignorance of the rubber-seconds era and its leaps. These people are effectively using an epoch of 1972-01-01T00:00:00 UTC = 63072000. There's no clean description of what they're counting since 1970. If doing this then it seems more consistent for pre-1972 timestamps to count back in TAI seconds, but in practice I think a vague-UT pre-1972 timescale gets grafted onto the TAI-synched post-1972 timescale. Bit of a mess. >1234567890 seconds of time_t makes no sense at the time that time_t >reads 1234567890 since it is not the number of seconds from the >reference epoch, it is a form of "mock seconds" to make the scales fit. Yes. This is sometimes succinctly described as counting "non-leap seconds since the epoch". -zefram _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
