[LEAPSECS] Look Before You Leap ? The Coming Leap Second and AWS | Hacker News

Steve Allen sla at ucolick.org
Thu May 21 09:43:22 EDT 2015


On Thu 2015-05-21T09:02:09 -0300, Eric R. Smith hath writ:
> and that "each and every day shall be accounted for by exactly 86400
> seconds". Is this correct? Since the length of the day is not in fact
> exactly 86400 SI seconds, it would follow that a POSIX compliant system
> has to know how many days have elapsed since the epoch, i.e. it needs to
> have some kind of access to the sky. Am I misunderstanding something?

POSIX does not want to know geophysics, nor astrometry, nor politics.
POSIX does not care what is meant by "day".
POSIX wants someone else to decide what "day" means, and for all those
other details to be handled outside the kernel in the libraries and
applications.

If that decision for the kind of "day" is any form of Universal Time
then, over the long span of time, POSIX is counting mean solar
seconds, not SI seconds.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>               WGS-84 (GPS)
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