Follow @Openwall on Twitter for new release announcements and other news
[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 15:34:31 -0500
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx>
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Pending patches/issues before 0.9.15 release?

On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 09:07:08PM +0100, Daniel Cegiełka wrote:
> 2013/11/21 Rich Felker <dalias@...ifal.cx>:
> 
> > I'm a pretty hardcore anti-leapseconds / pro-POSIX-seconds guy,
> 
> I think the big problem is the lack of proper approach to leapseconds
> and unfortunately it ends this way:
> 
> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/leap-second-glitch-explained/

A glitch which would never have happened without the abominations
which are leap seconds. Really, the core cause was the NTP folks'
agenda in forcing leap seconds onto a POSIX time model where they
don't work, resulting in discontinuous, non-monotonic clock jumps and
time ambiguity. If they'd instead smoothed out the difference between
POSIX seconds and SI seconds over the whole interval between leap
seconds as a tiny clock drift, reliable conversion back to TAI seconds
could be performed as a presentation step without breaking software
doing (valid, per POSIX) interval timing with time_t and
timeval/timespec.

> 25 seconds is a lot :/

25 seconds is a lot in one day. It's not a lot in 43 years. It's much
smaller than the error tolerance for audio and video timing, and
unlikely to matter for anything except physics experiments.

Rich

Powered by blists - more mailing lists

Confused about mailing lists and their use? Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia and check out these guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.