Poul-Henning Kamp wrote on 2005-01-24 09:32 UTC:
> In message <E1Ct09L-0001CL-00_at_mta1.cl.cam.ac.uk>, Markus Kuhn writes:
>
> >In summary: There are basically three proposals on the table:
> >
> > a) Keep UTC as it is (|UTC - UT1| < 900 ms) and just make TAI more
> > widely available in time signal broadcasts
> > [...]
> >My views:
> >
> > a) is perfectly fine (perhaps not ideal, but certainly workable)
>
> This is where we disagree: leapseconds are too small and too
> infrequent (in the next century at least) to be taken sufficiently
> serious in computer programming.
You surely must have seen my detailed UTS proposal for how UTC leap
seconds should be handled trivially and safely by the overwhelming
majority of computer applications, without any special considerations
whatsoever by normal application programmers:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/utc-torino-slides.pdf
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/uts.txt
All this is just a matter of providing an adequate standard guideline
for the very few Time Geeks that implement OS time APIs and kernel clock
drivers. The UTS draft has been discussed repeatedly here and elsewhere
over the past five years. I have yet to see a single technical objection
or a suggestion for improvement to it. (The only suggestion I remember
came from Daniel Gambis at the Torino meeting, which was only about the
name, because there is already another timescale called UTS defined by
IERS.)
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Received on Mon Jan 24 2005 - 02:48:56 PST