Interesting analysis. Preserving (2) means that systems that don't handle leap seconds (or don't have a leap seconds table updated in the last six months) have

Interesting analysis. Preserving (2) means that systems that don't handle leap seconds (or don't have a leap seconds table updated in the last six months) have a POSIX time at most 1 second away from systems that do. Dropping (2) would mean a more complicated formula to convert system times to times of day, but it would also make the failures and missing leap tables immediately noticeable, rather than a one-in-a-few-years event. Which would have made it the better choice; bugs encountered during development are easily handled, bugs that happen years later on production systems are inconvenient.