On Tue 2011-08-02T10:53:56 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ: > PHK and I are on the same page with this. > By all means announce leap seconds with significantly more notice.
Even so, I think it's important for operating systems that the kernel never have to deal with any sort of "unusual" event. In this case I would say that "unusual" does not include leap years, for they are predicted before the manufacture of any device and not subject to change within the lifetime of the device. I note that the Chinese contribution to Metrologia suggests a notion akin to "leap centuries" which seems to indicate that all the earth rotation anomalies would be adjusted by resetting the broadcast time scale once every hundred years. I'm not convinced that resetting the broadcast (and kernel) time scale can ever be acceptable. Any such thing begs the question of how to encode tables of the offsets such that past civil times can be reconstructed, but the whole point of tz/zoneinfo is to provide that kind of tables. Currently we see that ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ has tzdata2011h.tar.gz , so the politicians and bureaucrats have already messed with civil time on 8 occasions during this year. I'd much rather see a 3-year prediction of the content of the zoneinfo "leapseconds" file while the underlying broadcast and kernel timescale always remains uniform. That allows for separation of the policies and responsibilities of the broadcast time scale and the civil time scale so that each one can adopt rules best suited for its purposes. -- Steve Allen <[email protected]> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
