On 7/3/12 01:54 , Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> writes:
See http://landslidecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/linuxs-leap-second-deadlocks.htm...
Maybe we should stop wrenching the poor system time back and forth. We no longer add or subtract daylight savings time (or timezones) to the kernel time, why do we do it with leapseconds? We should really move the leapseconds correction into the display routines like DST and timezones already are. I believe the Olson time code already has ifdefs for doing this. I wonder why the system's internal time isn't run that way.
Neither timezones nor dst impact length of the mean solar day. TAI is some 35 seconds ahead of UTC this point. and will continue to diverge in a fashion which is not sufficiently predictable that you can know over the long term. Not using utc as the timebase is certainly possible, gps does that for example. Apps are buggy sounds like a really poor excuse for doing so.
-wolfgang