Re: REMINDER: Leap Second

["John Levine" <johnl () iecc com>]

In article <201501251019290550.005C05BC () smtp 24cl home> you write:
> I've always wondered why this is such a big issue, and why it's done
> as it is.

A lot of people don't think the current approach is so great.

> In UNIX, for instance, time is measured as the number of seconds
> since the UNIX epoch.  imo, the counting of the number of seconds
> should not be "adjusted", unless there's a time warp of some sort.
> The leap second adjustment should be in the display of the time,
> i.e., similar to how time zones are handled.

It shares with time zones the problem that you cannot tell what
the UNIX timestamp will be for a particular future time.  If
you want to have something happen at, say, July 2 2025 at 12:00 UTC
you can guess what the timstamp for that will be, but if there's
another leapsecond or two, you'll be wrong.

Life would be a lot easier for everyone except a handful of
astronomers if we forgot about leap seconds and adjusted by a full
minute every couple of centuries.