On 12/01/14 11:58, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message <[email protected]>, Brooks Harris writes:
But time_t has always been UTC, because it was meant to be UTC.
Oh, I see what you're saying. Of course - UTC in the historical non-Leap
Second period existed, and they intended time_t to reflect it.
Nice try to twist things to your own viewpoint, but you are wrong.
They meant UTC to be UTC.
They had absolutely no opinion on leapseconds.
Leapseconds, UT, UT1, UT2 or for that matter astronomers or their
opinions about time, played absolutely no role in the decision
making process.
Bell Labs were a telco-sidekick and the telco business used UTC
to isolate local timezones and DST issues to a presentation issue.
That degree of time focus in the telco busniess came much later.
Do I need to remind you that it was telcos caused UTC to be CCITT
business in the first place ?
CCIR actually. It was only later that CCIR and CCITT merged into ITU and
then their ITU-R and ITU-T divisions reflect the old CCIR and CCITT
organisations. To some degree the difference still exists.
Appearantly the only computing person outside timelabs who cared
about leapseconds prior to 1985 was Dave Mills.
I think this is much closer to the truth. Yes, they intended it to be
UTC, but just didn't know how it was defined. Back in those ages you
needed to know where the definition was and get that standard. It was
not just pulling the PDF of the web as it is today. Some things have
improved. Dave Mills being an academic did the homework so he learned
about it earlier.
Cheers,
Magnus
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