[tz] (topic drift) leap second theory

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Sun Aug 18 17:36:34 UTC 2019


Howard Hinnant wrote:
> I am working with them in the hopes of getting them to publis the IANA leapseconds information in_some_  form (the “right” subtree being one of those possible forms, the leapseconds source file being another).

I suggest the latter, as it's a lot smaller and less likely to go wrong.

Red Hat distributes /usr/share/zoneinfo/leapseconds, whereas Ubuntu distributes 
/usr/share/zoneinfo/leap-seconds.list. These have the same leap-second info but 
use different formats; leapseconds is input suitable for zic, whereas 
leap-seconds.list is the format that the NIST uses. I don't know why GNU/Linux 
distributions differ in this area. I hope Apple chooses one format or the other 
rather than going their own way.


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