[LEAPSECS] Leap seconds ain't broken, but most implementations are broken

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at burnicki.net> wrote:
 |Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:
 |> [1] As much as I dislike the leap seconds; smearing is only appropriate
 |> if you specifically have chosen it so they␦re not supposed to be in the
 |> pool.
 |
 |Agreed. Smearing in the way it is currently done by some Google servers
 |(and ntpd, if configured accordingly) is just a hack to workaround
 |problems with applications that are unable to account for leap seconds
 |correctly, and should only be used in closed environments.

So if you do it only in closed environments over that full control
is available then why should you have your clock off by multiple
hours and not slew a single second, for example?
It surely would have been much easier if CLOCK_TAI and the UTC
offset would have been widely distributed and advocated for many
years, and if the most portable standards would offer interfaces
for them.  Since the problem as such doesn't seem to leave us,
that is to say.

--steffen