Clive D.W. Feather wrote: >Firstly, I agree with Steve when he asks "why bother?". You're solving the >wrong problem.
Conciseness is useful for network protocols. Bandwidth is increasingly the limiting factor: CPU speed and bulk storage sizes have been increasing faster. An NTPv3 packet is only 48 octets of UDP payload; if a leap second table is to be disseminated in the same packets then we really do want to think about the format nybble by nybble. I'd like whatever format we use to be able to explicitly state its starting point. That way a long table can be split up into smaller chunks, to fit a fixed-size field in synchronisation packets. Time servers could send out a randomly-selected chunk of table with each packet, so that clients pick up the complete table over time without having to do anything special. -zefram