Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!botter!wundt!admin
From: admin@wundt.psy.vu.nl (Wundt Administrator)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.4bsd
Subject: Re: ctime(3) and leap seconds :-)
Message-ID: <175@wundt.psy.vu.nl>
Date: 11 Jan 88 08:59:26 GMT
References: <604@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> <6976@brl-smoke.ARPA> <20532@amdahl.amdahl.com> <38377@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: admin@psy.vu.nl (Wundt Administrator)
Organization: VU Psychologie, Amsterdam
Lines: 19
Keywords: ctime, leap second, epoch
Summary: Nice to know, but why worry?

In several articles precedding this a " bug " in ctime is discussed.

I really couldn't care much about 14 secs in 18 plus years.
My Watch Time (or SWT, if you prefer) is often off by more than
14 secs anyway. Further, the other U*IX sites we connect don't
aggree with MWT either. We differ by (oh gosh !!) minutes occainsionally.
Fortunately, noone has suffered (tremendously) from this.

Michael Felt

In article <38377@sun.uucp> guy@gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
 
>I would say that what *really* needs to be done is to recognize that few, if
>any implementations can possibly conform in the strictest sense, as few of them
>e.g. listen to WWV to set their clocks (and, I suspect, few customers are
>willing to pay the extra cost of having their system listen to WWV just so that
>they can be guaranteed not to have their clocks off even by one second), and to
>indicate that "seconds since the Epoch" merely indicates some reasonable effort
>to come *close* to seconds since the Epoch.