Zefram <[email protected]> wrote: > My Charlottesville paper > <https://www.fysh.org/~zefram/time/prog_on_time_scales.pdf> gives a > list of desiderata that includes the above, and some others, but without > much rationale. > > I've been wondering whether the file format should be textual or > binary. Possibly both should be specified: the binary format for easier > machine-readability and for smaller space usage, and the textual format > for human readability and editability. It would be trivially possible to > convert between the two formats. Also, I wonder about the check field > in a textual format: it should probably be optional, to support human > editability, though highly encouraged for published files. > > I imagine the body of the textual format looking something like this: > > 1972-01-01 1972-06-30 +10 > 1972-07-01 1972-12-31 +11 > 1973-01-01 1973-12-31 +12 > ... > 2009-01-01 2012-06-30 +34 > 2012-07-01 2015-06-30 +35 > 2015-07-01 2015-12-31 +36 > > That is, tuples of start date, end date, TAI-UTC difference. Leap events > are implied by different TAI-UTC differences on consecutive days. > End date of 2015-12-31 above doesn't imply that there'll be a leap > on that day, just that it's the end of the period for which we know > TAI-UTC = 36 s. Dates given in Gregorian calendar and ISO 8601 for human > readability (unlike leap-seconds.list, which despite being textual is > effectively impossible for an unaided human to understand). > > Anyone interested in me working up a full spec? > > -zefram
If you were to lead the writing of it one imagines many would like to read it :-) Surely everybody here regards you as an impartial arbiter. There are numerous external stake-holders, of course, and the WRC and tzdist deadlines may not be the only pertinent calendars. Rob _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
