[tz] Meta engineers oppose leap seconds

[Paul Eggert]

Monty Solomon writes that Meta engineers Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad 
Byagowi have come out against leap seconds in “It’s time to leave the 
leap second in the past”[1], which gives a shoutout to the 
leap-seconds.list file that Tim just updated in TZDB’s development version.

Meta uses a 17-hour quadratic smear starting at midnight UTC, whereas 
Google and Amazon use a 24-hour linear smear from noon to noon UTC.[2]

Obleukhov and Byagowi list several reasons leap seconds are a pain, say 
that the leap second is doing more harm than good (take that, scientists 
and astronomers!) and conclude that they “are supporting a larger 
community push to stop the future introduction of leap seconds”.

Although I don’t see any new technical material there, their note 
prompted me to reread [2] and notice that Google provides an unsmear 
library[3] that’s worth mentioning, so I installed the attached proposed 
patch into the development version.

[1] 
https://engineering.fb.com/2022/07/25/production-engineering/its-time-to-leave-the-leap-second-in-the-past/
[2] https://developers.google.com/time/smear
[3] https://github.com/google/unsmear
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