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Re:A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of J... by skrebbel on Monday January 05, 2015 @02:33PM (#8840614)
Because humans. Remember how confusing and difficult to find those bugs are where you forget to convert timezones that are, say, <3 hours away from one another? This must be very familiar especially to all African and European coders, where we're caught by this every time we forget to convert to/from UTC somewhere. It's easy to not notice it, while coding with some test data, when your software displays a time only one or two hours off. I bet many UK coders only notice their bug when summer begins. I'm not sure whether you valley people recognize this as well, but I'm sure you can imagine.

Now, instead, imagine things being only a few seconds off, instead of entire hours. How big is the chance that the bug would be caught before things hit production? What if, in some cases, seconds actually matter?

I think it's just asking for trouble.

To me, this is a bit like proposing binary protocols and not text protocols because it's obviously technically superior. It's a good idea until you factor in that software is made by humans.

Re:A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of J... by eleumik on Monday January 05, 2015 @04:32PM (#8841329)
Almost joking, but in my experience europeans (also not coders) are stronger in language-localization and currencies, while americans (also not coders) are strong in timezones ;-)
Re:A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of J... by adamtj on Monday January 05, 2015 @03:17PM (#8840857)
> Now, instead, imagine things being only a few seconds off, instead of entire hours.

No, and yes, and anyway it doesn't matter.

No, that wouldn't be the case. If you mess up the local->global conversion, you'd still be hours off, not just seconds. Realistically, we would probably need to define TAI2 = TAI + 35 seconds and then switch to that. Then the only immediate change would be that we'd stop adding the leap second flag to NTP updates. If you were doing UTC conversions correctly before, you'd automatically be doing TAI2 conversions correctly after, but if you mess up that conversion, you'll still be hours off.

But yes, such a change would introduce a new problem: Software or systems that are not updated to handle leap seconds in offsets might display localtime a second or two off.

Still, it wouldn't matter much. Non-TAI2 systems might display localtime a second or two off, but their clocks would still be correctly synchronized. Having an incorrect offset would be like inadvertently defining your own custom timezone. Nobody else would care about your timezone (whether it's a standard one or not), because you'd be communicating with them using global time based on your correctly synchronized clock.

Re:A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of J... by pornel on Monday January 05, 2015 @03:32PM (#8840947)
I can confirm about the UK. I've written timezone-sensitive code once during winter and it turned out later that it was full of subtle bugs with serious consequences.
Re:A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of J... by tejaswiy on Monday January 05, 2015 @03:04PM (#8840787)
I don't follow. Won't you have all the issues you mentioned by storing timestamps in UTC?

Instead of converting from UTC to Local time, you'll be converting from TAI to Local time.

Re:A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of J... by lmm on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @05:57AM (#8843761)
I'm a big fan of fail-fast, but no-one tests for leap seconds (and how can you?). Every time a leap second happens, there are massive failures, both in big corporate systems (oracle!) and in open-source ones (linux!).

If seconds matter you should be testing seconds. I submit that being off by 3 seconds all the time is an easier mistake to catch in testing than "explodes every time there is a leap second".