On 19 January 2014 15:34, Daniel R. Tobias <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 18 Jan 2014 at 19:51, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>> Of course, the 6 month window does make it impossible to compute a time_t 
>> for a known
>> interval into the future that's longer than 6 months away...
>
> What are the applications that actually need to schedule events more
> than 6 months in the future that need to be precisely synchronized to
> civil time at a resolution of under a second? Gee, I might miss the
> plane for the airline reservation I made 7 months in advance if I
> show up one second late! (Actually, both myself and the airline, if
> we care about this level of detail, will have adjusted our
> clocks/watches by flight day, including any leap seconds in the
> interim, and I'll be right on time.)

If you want to store a time in the future its best to focus on the
local time. In API terms, a UTC class is best representing data using
two numbers, typically modified-julian-day + second-of-day. Stored
like that, the announcement of a leap second doesn't generally affect
things. ie. Separation of the concept of day/date from time-of-day is
a Good Thing for most users.

When such concepts were in Java's JSR-310, I concluded that you needed
to have both TAI and UTC to provide full user control. TAI so a user
could schedule something n SI seconds in the future and UTC to
schedule something more sensibly. Eventually we concluded that most
users just don't care/know enough about TAI/UTC/leaps, so we removed
them.

Stephen
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