Re: Leap Second 2015-06-30 23:59:60 UTC

[Ray Dillinger]

On 06/30/2015 02:04 PM, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Bob Proulx <bob-5cAygf9QrE/address@hidden> writes:
> 
>> Hmm...  I don't know.  Should this work?
> 
> No. POSIX doesn't have leap seconds.
> 
> Andreas.
> 

I can definitely see the point in maintaining a simplified
notion of time for most purposes - principle of least
surprise, minimizing rarely-tested cases, minimize dependency
on external resources, etc.

But it's still kind of a misfit; there are a number of places
where they need to take special steps when a leap second happens.
"Principle of least surprise" is that there ought to be a
way to use a cron job, or some other standard POSIX mechanism.
to schedule them.

Years ago my brother was traveling via rail in the US when a
daylight saving time transition happened, and Amtrak's procedure
for dealing with daylight saving time then was to simply shut
down all the trains, no matter where they were, from the first
1AM to the second 1AM, because that was easier to figure out and
more reliable to get everyone to follow without mistakes.

Right now we're following a fairly similar strategy for
scheduling network traffic, cron jobs, etc, around leap seconds.
We're just hoping that if we ignore it hard enough we won't
be affected by it.


                        Bear

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