Time library

[Simon Marlow]

John Meacham writes:
> We should define the ClockTime to be in terms of TAI to the=20
> best of the
> systems ability. at worst, we subtract 20 seconds from posix=20
> time, this
> would be infinitly better than not knowing whether ClockTimes=20
> are TAI or
> posix and whether we can safely subtract them or do anything=20
> interesting with them.=20

Ok, but I don't understand why subtracting 20 seconds from POSIX time
would be any better - that doesn't fix the fact that the scale is
missing leap seconds, does it?  You still can't do arithmetic on it and
get meaningful results.

I think I understand the problem.  It is this:

  Many systems run their clocks on POSIX time_t.  We could
  reconstruct TAI time from time_t by adding leap seconds, except
  around the actual time of a leap second.  Around the time of a leap
  second, the NTP daemon will be adjusting the system clock
  backwards, and we won't be able to tell what the correct time is.

  Furthermore, we don't know whether the system is running on POSIX
  time_t, or "correct" time_t.

  libtai assumes a "correct" time_t.  (this in itself is evidence
  that we should too).

On a system with glibc, you can set your system time to "correct"
time_t, by setting TZ to something like "right/GMT" (try it), and you
also have to configure ntpd to do the right thing (I've no idea how to
do this).  On a system configured like this, our ClockTime will
automatically be TAI-based, there's no need for leap-second tables.  I
suggest this is the way we should go - users who really need a correct
ClockTime should configure their systems appropriately.

So, we could either

  (a) Try to reconstruct TAI time from the system time, and accept that
      it will be wrong around the time of a leap second.  We'll need
      a way to tell the library whether the system time is POSIX or
      not.  Perhaps:

        systemTimeIncludesLeapSeconds :: Bool -> IO ()

  (b) Accept whatever the system tells us.  On a correctly-configured
      system, you get a TAI-based ClockTime, otherwise you get a=20
      POSIX-based ClockTime.

  (c) Or we can ditch the whole idea.

I vote for (b).

(I'll leave the other points in John's message until we've sorted this
out, but they won't be lost).

Cheers,
	Simon