> The solution is simple - move to TAI. That is the _true_ time, what > the master clocks actually keep. UTC is just a variant for creatures > living on the surface of the Earth. Being one of those creatures, I voted for keeping leap seconds. UTC seems to fit the global Internet quite nicely, although it has some problems. When we'll inhabit faraway planets and use some other time reference, we'll be facing /more/ problems, not less. >> The problems caused by leap seconds are that they make it impossible for two >> machines to know if they are referring to the same point in future time and >> quite often introduce errors in the present. >> >> 1) No machine can determine the number of seconds between two arbitrary UTC >> dates in the future since there may be a leap second announced. > > Not true for TAI. TAI is computed after averaging several clocks, so it is not known in advance either. Both UTC and TAI are labels, albeit the latter is smoother. >> 2) If Machine A is attempting to synchronize with machine B on a future >> point in time, they cannot do so unless they know that they have the same >> view of leap seconds. If a leap second is announced and only one makes the >> correction, an error is introduced. > > Not true for TAI The problem is still ill-defined for faraway or accelerated machines, according to relativity. For practical purposes, the divergence of their timekeeping is likely, unless they are well connected to a common time reference. In that case, they can as well connect to one another, no? _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf