TAI zone?

[Russ Allbery]

Paul Koning <paul_koning at Dell.com> writes:

> "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.

That isn't really what the ACM article says.  Insofar as it makes an
argument, it's arguing for just never declaring another leap second and
letting UTC drift, possibly fixing that with a time zone change at the
point at which enough error has accumulated to shift time by an hour.  It
isn't arguing for undoing any of the leap seconds that we've already been
through.

The alternative proposal is that leap seconds be declared twenty years in
advance so that one can build and distribute a leap second table so that
computer time-keeping systems can anticipate and adjust for them in
advance.

Mostly the article just goes over the whole leap second mess and its
implications for monotonic time, the details of which are probably already
familiar to most of the people on this list.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>