[LEAPSECS] Future time

[John Hawkinson]

Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote on Sun, 19 Jan 2014
at 10:34:41 -0500 in <52DBF091.26529.1101BD6E at dan.tobias.name>:



> What are the applications that actually need to schedule events more 

> than 6 months in the future that need to be precisely synchronized to 

> civil time at a resolution of under a second? Gee, I might miss the 

> plane for the airline reservation I made 7 months in advance if I 


It is not so simple.

Suppose a user enters an event in my calendar for 3:00pm US/Eastern on
August 1, 2014.

Then a leap second happens.

If my calendar software changes my event to start at 2:59:59pm 
instead, it may annoy users. "I put this in for 3pm, it shouldn't
be telling me 2:59:59! I don't like this program." (Or worse,
like displaying it at 2:59pm; or not showing it in a graphical
view because the constraint is "all events starting on or after 3pm.")

It's not so easy to decide what the appropriate precision necessarily
is for user interactions. It's...tricky.

--jhawk at mit.edu
  John Hawkinson