Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
If we can increase the tolerance to 10sec, IERS can give us the
leapseconds with 20 years notice and only the minority of computers
that survive longer than that would need to update the factory
installed table of leapseconds.

Rob Seaman replied:
No.  Rather all computers that exist during such an event are
obligated to deal with it.  The number of deployed systems follows
some increasing trend similar to Moore's law.  By delaying the
adjustments, you guarantee that more systems will be affected when
they do occur.  And, unless you can guarantee that a particular
deployed system (and systems derived through various upgrade
pathways) will be retired prior to the adopted horizon, prudent
policy would require remediation in any event.

Would like to see a proposed architecture a little more detailed than
a "factory installed table".

PHK can reply for himself here but, for the record, I think RS's
reading of what he said is different from mine.  My assumption is
that PHK is discussing the idea that leaps should be scheduled many
years in advance.  They should continue to be single second leaps -
just many more would be in the schedule pipeline at any given
point.

Obviously, the leap seconds would be scheduled on the best available
estimates but as we don't know the future rotation of the Earth this
would necessarily increase the tolerance.  In theory DUT1 would be
unbounded (as it sort of is already) but PHK is assuming that there'd
be some practical likely upper bound such as 10 seconds.

Am I right in this reading?

Ed.

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