I couldn't help noticing that Debian just issued an update to tzone, so that means Linux systems now know about the leap second.
-Chuck Harris Tim Shoppa wrote:
I'm not sure there's any computer time package that correctly disambiguates 23:59:59 vs 23:59:60 in UTC timestamps in a general purpose way. Some software simply rejects 23:59:60 UTC as invalid, some will quietly map it to 23:59:59 effectively making those two seconds impossible to distinguish. There are important systems in the world, those that genuinely have to distinguish between those two seconds, that do all timekeeping in TAI or GPS timescales instead of UTC. I think the Olsen timezone database/library does support TAI. I don't know if the Olsen timzone library supports GPS. V.P., since you mention Perl and leap seconds, I'd like to point out that there's a very useful Perl library for computing delta times around leapsecond jumps: http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/DateTime-1.12/lib/DateTime/LeapSecond.pm This particular library is useful if you need to know the correct delta time between UTC timestamps but have chosen to ignore the ambiguity problem of correctly marking the leapsecond itself. The "newest announced leap second" is not in the table of leapseconds built into the code yet, but it's a simple matter to add it (cut and paste from the IPERS). Tim.
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