[LEAPSECS] the big artillery

[Martin Burnicki]

Magnus Danielson wrote:
> On 10/31/2014 02:49 AM, Sanjeev Gupta wrote:
>> Give it a new name, please.  Independent of what the "fundamental
>> unit" is.
>
> TAI and UTC already exists, but the use of TAI has been actively
> discouraged.

Huuh?

Just "recently" PTP/IEEE1588 has been specified to use TAI timestamps by 
default, and provide a UTC offset as parameter.

As far as I can see it's easy to derive "legacy" UTC from TAI 
unambiguously if you know the current offset, and if you have a leap 
second table available this also works for timestamps from the past, at 
least after 1970. So what could be the reason *not* to use TAI?

> The trouble is that those that wants a TAI-like time-scale
> sometimes needs to comply to UTC needs, and for a number of reasons they
> have difficulty in using it, so they want to make UTC a TAI-timescale.

The naming of a possible future UTC-like time scale without leap seconds 
is a different topic, though, and I fully agree with Harlan's and 
Sanjeev's recent postings.


Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

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