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I hate tzdata updates with a passion, politicians should just get a grip and stop messing around with timezones. I'm all for ideas that create new jobs but this
by derpmeister 14y ago
I hate tzdata updates with a passion, politicians should just get a grip and stop messing around with timezones. I'm all for ideas that create new jobs but this isn't one of them.
- streptomycin 14y agoIf you come up with a way of predicting when leap seconds will be needed (hint: it's not a constant regular time interval), let us all know. Until then, there will need to be adjustments.
- wmf 14y agoLeap seconds aren't needed at all. I'd rather let them accumulate until there's a leap hour that can be rolled into DST (although DST may not exist that far in the future).
- MichaelGG 14y agoDST doesn't exist in UTC, so that's irrelevant. A one-hour UTC shift would totally, utterly, screw stuff up. But, at the current rate, a one-hour "leap" would happen in thousands of years, so maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. But I think the reason for leap seconds has to do with keeping UTC in sync with other clock systems, and that probably overrides any inconvenience to software.
- moe 14y agoI wonder why they don't implement the google solution on pool.ntp.org. I.e. gradually slow/accelerate time over the course of a day, rather than stepping it hard at once. I'd say this approach would be vastly preferable for about 100% of the systems relying on pool.ntp.org. The remaining 0%, e.g. scientific applications that absolutely need the leap second to appear at exactly the right moment, most likely don't use pool.ntp.org anyways. And for those who do they could create a second pool with the old behavior. Maybe call it science.ntp.org.
- mikeash 14y agoA one-second UTC shift seems to be pretty good at totally screwing stuff up already. At least a one-hour shift would happen once every few centuries instead of once every few years.
- Negitivefrags 14y agoThe solution is not to change UTC, but just to rotate the time zones of each country every now and then. DST has proven that a country is able to change time zones twice a year. This would happen far less often.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- phaker 14y agoIf you want something that looks like UTC minus the leap second trouble, then there is TAI. Right now TAI and UTC differ by about 30 seconds.
- wmf 14y agoI can't switch to TAI because then I'd be 30 seconds off from everybody else. And everybody can't switch to TAI because that disruption would be even larger than what we saw this weekend. IMO the solution is to leave the leap seconds that were already added but not add any more.
- michaelt 14y agoYou don't think the leap-hour will be a new millennium bug? When you look at how much people crap their pants over the leap second - a relatively common thing - I dread to think how unprepared people would be for something 3,600 times less common.
- wmf 14y agoYes, it would be similar to Y2K. Hopefully politicians could agree decades in advance so people would have plenty of time to prepare. Also, since you're only changing the tzdata and not UTC, much less would break and most of the breakage would be purely cosmetic. Right now we have several tzdata changes per year and they cause much less disruption than leap seconds.