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On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 11:48:31PM -0600, Linas Vepstas wrote: > There *was* talk of eliminating them forever (so as to > avoid this kind of bug, which affects banks, satellites, > telecom equipment, etc.) but I guess they didn't do it. I can sympathise with the opinion that linux should be able to accurately distinguish xx:59:60 when a leap second is added (or the missing :59 when one is subtracted) but not at the expense of making a day which is not 86400 seconds long. To fix the problem would require accurately modeling international timekeeping standards such as TAI and use of different syscalls to return time in TAI and UTC-with-leap-seconds represented. It wouldn't be good to change the semantics of time(). * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second Arguably the kernel's responsibility should be to keep track of the most fundamental representation of time possible for a machine (that's probably TAI) and it is a userspace responsibility to map from that value to other time standards including UTC, using control files which are updated as leap seconds are declared. Just so long as the existing behaviour of time() which doesn't recognise leap seconds is preserved. Nick. | ||||||||||||
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