[LEAPSECS] leap second roundup 2017

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

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In message <alpine.DEB.2.11.1710241530180.22527 at grey.csi.cam.ac.uk>, Tony Finch
 writes:
>Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
>>
>> If you magically got all the paperwork changed, you would see a
>> repeat of the GMT fiasco, where UTC is still called "GMT" 50 years
>> later...
>
>GMT has had many definitions over its lifetime, including a 12h step, so
>I'm not convinced that polysemy is a world-ending disaster.

The parallel is not as convincing as you may think.  Back then, the people
who worked with stuff where it made a difference knew what they were doing,
being generally people with "phd." after their name.

If you tried to 'fix' things by adding a timescale now, 99.9% of the
people who needed to react are not clued.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.