[tz] TAI as a time zone?

DataPacRat datapacrat at gmail.com
Sun Sep 15 07:36:30 UTC 2013


On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> On 09/14/2013 08:15 PM, DataPacRat wrote:
>> Would it be feasible to include International Atomic Time (TAI) and/or
>> GPS time (which differs from TAI by a fixed number of seconds) in the
>> tz database as a time zone separate from UTC?
>
> It should be easy to do for the "right" subdirectory,
> which supports proper UTC with leap seconds,
> but I'm not sure how well it'd work for the "posix"
> subdirectory, which lacks leap seconds.  To find out
> for sure, someone should try it and see what happens.

I'm afraid that I don't yet know enough about the subdirectories to
comment, but I do know that the standard for POSIX time includes leap
seconds - adding one at the appropriate :60 when one's added, or
jumping from :58 to :00 should one ever be subtracted. A variant which
ignores leap seconds and matches TAI is "non-conforming". (Handiest
reference: first sentence of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time#TAI-based_variant .)


Thank you for your time,
--
DataPacRat
"Then again, I could be wrong."


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