On Wed 2005-08-31T09:16:33 -0400, John.Cowan hath writ:
> That's exactly what /usr/share/zoneinfo is for, and even it buries all
> historical timezone differences older than the Epoch, which was only 35
> years ago. We manage well enough: the total amount of data in binary
> form is only 5 MiB, trivial by today's standards.
Yet the zoneinfo needs to be updated numerous times per year at
unpredictable intervals as a result of arbitrary actions by
legislatures all over the world.
The additional data required to handle leap seconds in the "right"
versions of zoneinfo is trivially smaller than the geopolitical data,
and the scheduling is more predictable.
If POSIX were to fix the definitions of time_t and epoch, why would
this not imply that handling leap seconds with Unix would become
trivial?
--
Steve Allen <sla_at_ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99858
University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06014
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
Received on Wed Aug 31 2005 - 07:46:04 PDT