On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 12:01:11AM +0000, David Laight wrote:
On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 05:50:10PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 11:44:18PM +0000, David Laight wrote:
What isn't clear (form the associated standards) is what you should do to the system clock at the point the leap second is added/subtracted. (Due to variations in the moment of intertia of the earth there have been seconds added aas well as subtracted, even though the earth's rotation is slowing down because the moon keeps stealing angular momentum from it.)
Well, if your system clock keeps proper time as measured in seconds since the epoch in UTC :), you don't need to do anything to the system clock; the leap seconds should then be applied when displaying time in the local time zone.
No - leap seconds have to be ignored when counting time the epoch. Check the posix spec (www.opengroup.org for starters).
POSIX doesn't control the definition of "UTC". If the system clock is stored in UTC, then handling of leap seconds is a requirement when converting from UTC to a local timezone.
Steve Langasek postmodern programmer