Re: [LEAPSECS] Stupid question from programmer: Why not just eliminate ALL UTC corrections ?

From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_haven.freebsd.dk>
Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 10:04:13 +0200

In message <E1E0x0w-0005VL-00_at_grus.atnf.CSIRO.AU>, Mark Calabretta writes:

> As of 2004, POSIX has new interfaces making several different time
> scales available to programs, splitting up the many uses to which
> Unix times have traditionally been put. The future is one where time
> values are accompanied by explicit labels of the time scale defining
> their significance. Unix time as described in this article will
> still be in wide use for decades to come, but is likely to be
> increasingly treated as a legacy system and superseded by better-
> defined systems.
>
>An optimistic interpretation of this would be that POSIX.1 will provide
>for unix time to be maintained as TAI.
>
>A pessimistic scenario would be that finally when POSIX caught up with
>leap seconds they were dropped!

No, the realistic scenario is that POSIX messes timekeeping in UNIX
even more up than it already is :-(

Remember, these are the people to took the struct timeval mistake
and propagated it to struct timespec :-(

--
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk_at_FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Fri Aug 05 2005 - 01:04:25 PDT

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