TAI zone?

David Magda dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca
Wed Jun 29 18:54:21 UTC 2011


On Wed, June 29, 2011 14:27, Paul Koning wrote:
> "Remove leap seconds from UTC" is clearly absurd, and I'm baffled that ACM
> would lend its good name to such a notion.  UTC is defined as atomic time
> plus leap seconds, for good and sufficient reasons.  And as was pointed
> out, TAI already exists for those who want atomic time plain, without leap
> seconds.

This proposal has been around for a few years, and it's coming up for a
vote in the next little while:

   http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/06/28/1616231/
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Proposal_to_abolish_leap_seconds

There's a listserv on the topic:

   http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs

If you feel strongly one way or the other I'm not quite sure what your
options are for making your opinion heard.

> I wonder if this requests amounts to "Posix should be extended to provide
> an interface to TAI".  If so, that certainly makes sense.  Is that
> something tzdata can do, or does it have to be done in some other layer?

Nothing specific. I was just reminded of the issue via the Slashdot story,
and was wondering what options were available for those people that
want/need to have their systems ignore leap seconds (just like people who
want OSes not have to deal with DST can do a TZ=UTC).





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