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Leaping seconds and looping serversLeaping seconds and looping serversPosted Jul 10, 2012 16:00 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Leaping seconds and looping servers by rschroev Parent article: Leaping seconds and looping servers
The problem with that ultra-simple case is that it is completely incompatible with the installed base of applications. You *cannot* change gettimeofday() et al to return TAI, because nobody who calls gettimeofday() is expecting it, and because the relevant standard guarantees that adding 86400 to a time will always give you the same time on the next day. A *lot* of code depends on this assumption, and you can't sensibly distinguish between code that wants 'exactly one day from now' and code that wants 'the same time, tomorrow' -- which suddenly become different things, though the authors of the code making that assumption pretty much universally didn't expect that.
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Leaping seconds and looping servers Posted Jul 10, 2012 16:09 UTC (Tue) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link] ... and because the relevant standard guarantees that adding 86400 to a time will always give you the same time on the next day. A *lot* of code depends on this assumption, ...That assumption is already wrong twice a year in places that observe daylight saving time, by a full hour in most places, which is a lot more than the difference between TAI and UTC. Code that depends on it is already incorrect.
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