[TUHS] Leap Second

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

schily at schily.net (Joerg Schilling) wrote:
 |Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
 |> sds <stephen.strowes at gmail.com> wrote:
 |>> Important question: did anybody have an "exciting" new year because \
 |>> of a leap
 |>> second bug?
 |>
 |> I've been collecting failure reports on the LEAPSECS list
 |
 |https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-and-why-the-leap-second-affected-cloudflare\
 |-dns/
 |
 |"go" seems to have a related bug.
 |
 |BTW: The POSIX standard intentionally does not include leap seconds \
 |in the UNIX 
 |time interface as it seems that this would cause more problems than \
 |it claims 
 |to fix.

I think it is a problem, or better a gap, a void, with the current
standard that software has no option to become informed of the
event of a leap second for one, but further more that CLOCK_TAI is
not available.  I think it would make things easier if software
which wants just that can get it, e.g., for periodic timer events
etc.  This is surely not a healing given that most timestamps etc.
are based on UTC, but i think the severity of the problems could
possibly be lowered.  Especially now that multi-hour smears seem
to become used by big companies it seems to be important to have
a correct clock available.  This is in fact something i don't
really understand, at _that_ level that is to say.  If, e.g.,
Google and Bloomberg both would have stated instead that they
slew the leap second, then only a single second would have been
affected, instead of multiple hours.

--steffen