[LEAPSECS] alternative to smearing

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 4:26 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
> [do something N years in the future]
>> Except that's not how things are programmed. Programming it that way would
>> be very inefficient in a part of the kernel that has to be ultra-efficient.
>> Since you don't know how many seconds it will from now, you can't schedule a
>> timeout. The current setup of UTC doesn't let me know how many seconds it
>> will be in the future. People can talk about it, but computers don't always
>> store things that way. ...
>
> Are there any performance critical chunks of code that want to wait until N
> years from now?  I doubt it.

With due respect, that's a crappy attitude to getting something right.
You want to have one interface that always works that's easy to use
and schedule with. If you don't have that, then your software is more
likely to break. IMHO, that's yet another example of the "it's only a
second" attitude that keeps us from having nice things like a working
UTC implementation on Unix.

Warner