Re: number of seconds since the epoch

[Chuck Swiger <cswiger%mac.com@localhost>]

On Dec 9, 2010, at 3:50 AM, Robert Elz wrote:
>>  Also, it looks like even if I do replace the zoneinfo files, time, 
>> gettimeofday, and
>>  clock_gettime will still behave badly on a leap second, and rewind.
> 
> Ah, no, leap seconds don't work like that.   The system as a whole has
> never heard of leap seconds, and will just ignore them.   That means, the
> leap second is treated exactly the same as any other second (not that we
> pretend it never happened and time stood still).

Agreed.  If you want a clock which always counts forward and does not rewind or 
jump forward when a leap second happens, time(0) and 
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, ...) ought to be usable without any further 
tweaks.  If you want to consider "wall time" including leap seconds, daylight 
savings time bouncing the hour back and forth, etc, then that is what 
clock_gettime(CLOCK_REALTIME, ...), gettimeofday(), etc are for.

As for ntpd, stratum-1 NTP timeservers are expected to either keep a current 
version of the leapseconds file, or be deriving their time from a reference 
source like GPS, ACTS, WWBV, etc which provides leap-second indications.  
Higher stratum NTP servers rely on leap-second indications provided by 
stratum-1 timesources.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck