>> Time within the machine should be measured relative to its own temporal >> frame, but whenever we communicate with another machine we need to >> strive to be as close to UTC as possible - warts and all. Anything else >> - including and especially smearing - compromises *correct* behavior. > > >?So you are for sticking with IPv4 as well? > >Nothing can ever change because the ITU is in charge...? > >?People are only in charge as long as other people let them. ? The 'obvious' solution is to make programmers, from operating systems all the way to application programmers, aware that there are different types of time. Most programmers should already know that there is a difference between local time and UTC. We need to extend that a bit. In particular, we need - a monotonic 'uptime' that can be used for local timers, etc. independent of any external time source. - we need UTC. Civil time is UTC. We have no control over that. For many, many years we know that leap seconds are a problem, but we are still stuck with it. For many, many years we also know the daylight saving time is silly. But we have good solution for the timezone stuff. - we need a sensible time. There are many ways to define a sensible time, but TAI is available, so let's use that. For me, sensible time includes using SI seconds for keeping track of time. The main thing is that, by and large, this is not a network problem. If a system uses TAI internally, it can use UTC for NTP, for SMTP, HTTP, etc. The only thing we may have to do at the network level is improve the availability of an up-to-date leap second list. The big thing is, making sure that operating systems offer TAI as a first class citizen. Making sure that timers are set using MONOTONIC clocks and making sure that applications that use subsecond precision for time information internally use TAI and only convert to UTC for interacting with users. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an IETF equivalent for operating systems, so it will be completely random whether anything will happen in this area or not.