TAI zone?

[Paul Koning]

On Jun 29, 2011, at 8:22 PM, Robert Elz wrote:

>    Date:        Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:27:53 -0400
>    From:        Paul Koning <paul_koning at Dell.com>
>    Message-ID:  <1ED832E5-A4DA-4BCC-8273-BA2715F12017 at dell.com>
> 
>  | 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?
> 
> It is a mess.   Do remember that POSIX time is really neither UTC nor TAI.
> That is, it acts like TAI, but the value is the same as it would be if it
> were UTC.   POSIX manages this by making seconds be variable length objects,
> so there's always exactly 31536000 of them in a year (31622400 in leap years).

Wow.  Are you sure of that?  If true, that is incredibly stupid.  It clearly isn't part of the charter of any such standard to redefine the metric system.

Also, even if it does pretend to define it that way, it isn't implemented that way in the real world.  I have never seen a system that uses nonstandard seconds, and I certainly will not tolerate such a system in any place where I have anything to do with its design.

	paul