"How are systems being notified of the leap seconds now, that wouldn't immediately enable them to update their hypothetical leap second table?" I am not an exp

"How are systems being notified of the leap seconds now, that wouldn't immediately enable them to update their hypothetical leap second table?" I am not an expert, but as far as I know the most automated solutions are doing it via NTP, which just resets the second, then relies on clock drift to bring everything back into synch. Otherwise, I think your only option is to keep the timezone packages up-to-date (which is a non-trivial task for large deployments). A quick search found this: http://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=7001865 http://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=7001865 "But the 'solution' we're using now is to make system time less accurate, not more accurate." Yeah, I'm not disputing this. I'm just saying that preserving the assumption that "day == 86400 seconds" probably breaks less code than the alternative. NTP messes with the notion of seconds-since-epoch anyway, so we know that single-second variations in unix time aren't automatically deadly to most unix software.