Re:An Update on Leap Seconds
by denton-scratch on Monday January 30, 2023 @05:44PM
(#34587647)
> If they just stopped adding leap seconds to UTC at some point
That seems a fair point; and rather obvious - I'm embarrassed thatI don't have an answer.
If they just stopped adding leap seconds to UTC at some point, why would there be any ambiguity about the definition of any given UTC time?
> So lets call the new timescale NTS. Lots of records and timestamps have been made using UTC. So now we'll need a way of converting timestamps between UTC and NTS. We already have future timestamps in UTC; e.g. "This record must be destroyed at midnight UTC, Jan 1 2036". So even after we've switched to NTS, we'll still need to calculate UTC, so we'll still need leap-second announcements.
The schedule of leap seconds in the future isn't known, so such a timestamp isn't precisely defined yet anyway. Abolishing the practice fixes this.