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Leaping seconds and looping serversLeaping seconds and looping serversPosted Jul 9, 2012 18:44 UTC (Mon) by dark (subscriber, #8483)In reply to: Leaping seconds and looping servers by giraffedata Parent article: Leaping seconds and looping servers
Ah, but consider the user who says "3 days after Friday 10:00". Presumably that user wants "Monday 10:00", and not "Monday 9:00, 10:00 or 11:00 depending on whether there is a DST transition this weekend". So yeah, you can't use 86400*n anyway. Unless you want to mishandle DST, which is the option chosen by the vast majority of applications :)
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Leaping seconds and looping servers Posted Jul 9, 2012 23:16 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Indeed. 1 day = 86400 seconds is a computation that was broken from the start. It wasn't working back in the day POSIX was defined, and of course, things could only go downhill from there.
As a bunch of others have pointed out, leap seconds are very similar in essence to timezones -or any other oddity of civil time- in that they are _arbitrary_. They really belong in the code that has no choice but to handle them: the system libraries (glibc for modern Linux distros).
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