How Google handle leap seconds

Re:How Google handle leap seconds by crazygringo on Saturday June 30, 2012 @09:20PM (#4183427)

Does anyone know what the original reasoning was for Unix timestamps to not account for leap seconds? So that one timestamp can actually point to two physical times a second apart?

I mean, I know leap seconds aren't scheduled, and it's convenient to find a day by dividing by 86400, but it really seems like "physical seconds since the epoch" is the "fundamental" amount of time, as opposed to physical days, and the function that calculates datetimes (including time zones and DST) could just handle the leap seconds too.

It's obviously not changing now, was just wondering about the historical context of it. It seems like Unix time and leap seconds both come from the beginning of the 1970's... was Unix time defined before the concept of leap seconds were?

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Re:How Google handle leap seconds by jwm on Sunday July 01, 2012 @05:56AM (#4184328)

From the Wikipedia article on Leap Seconds:

> Because the Earth's rotation speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and unpredictable. Insertion of each UTC leap second is usually decided about six months in advance by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS)

I don't see how applications could make unix second <-> day conversions without downloading a map from the IERS, if leap seconds were included.

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