[LEAPSECS] alternative to smearing

[Brooks Harris]

On 2017-01-04 10:22 AM, Steve Summit wrote:
> John Sauter wrote:
>> On Tue, 2017-01-03 at 13:28 -0500, Michael Rothwell wrote:
>>> Why are you in such favor of leap seconds?
>> I regard leap seconds as a reasonable compromise between the needs of
>> civil time and of science.  Civil time needs a clock that tracks the
>> days and the seasons.  Science requires a clock that measures time in
>> precise intervals.  UTC provides both, using leap seconds to keep
>> atomic time synchronized with the rotation of the Earth.
> 100% agree with John.  For thousands of years we've been doing a
> better and better job of more perfectly aligning our chronometry
> with the natural world.  If we abandon leap seconds, we're taking
> a step (however small) backwards.
>
> Another reason: I'm a C programmer.  The C standard says that
> tm_sec has the range [0, 60].  But Posix won't let me see that 60.
> I want to fix that.
>
> Another reason: I'm a programmer at all.  One way of looking
> at the present situation is that it's the physicists and the
> astronomers who have done a better and better job of aligning our
> chronometry with the natural world, but if we take this step
> backwards, it's because it's too hard for the *programmers* to
> properly implement the solution.  So there's definitely some
> professional pride at stake here.
>
> In fact -- for me, not talking about anyone else -- probably
> the real reason I'm still tilting at this windmill is almost
> perfectly summed up in that classic old screed about engineers:
>
> 	Ego
>
> 	The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is
> 	to declare that the problem is unsolvable.  No engineer
> 	can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it's solved.
> 	No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the
> 	engineer off the case.  These types of challenges quickly
> 	become personal -- a battle between the engineer and the
> 	laws of nature.
That's the spirit!

I've been dismayed to see all the engineers quit the effort in the face 
of the on-going "eliminate Leap Seconds" debate. I believe its certainly 
doable with the modern technology available, and its really a fun 
engineering challenge, isn't it?

>
> But don't get me wrong; I do understand (the more so having
> grappled with them up close and personal) that the obstacles to
> "proper" handling of leap seconds are formidable.
Yes, it could be a fools errand. Many good attempts have gone aground in 
the past. But I believe if a viable solution emerges with enough support 
from enough experts it could eventually find its way to wide adoption.

-Brooks

> I mentioned
> being a programmer, but the other kind I am is a Unix programmer,
> and it was Unix that gave rise to Richard Gabriel's essay about
> the "New Jersey approach", which holds that simplicity of
> implementation is sometimes even more important than strict
> correctness.  And it only recently occurred to me that there's
> no better example of this tradeoff than deciding that
> monotonic-seconds-since-1970 is "good enough", is practically
> better even though it's also "worse" in not having any good way
> of encoding leap seconds.
>
> Steve Summit
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