Time Library Organisation

[Ashley Yakeley]

In article <41F77995.9070700 at imperial.ac.uk>,
 Keean Schupke <k.schupke at imperial.ac.uk> wrote:

> My vote goes for a TAI style time,

TAI time isn't usually available. System clocks are usually set to "Unix 
time", which is almost, but not quite, isomorphic with UTC. Sometimes 
they're set to a timezone-adjusted variant.

I think conventional "best practice" is to have the system clock set to 
Unix time, synchronised by NTP. Together with its "leap-second bit", set 
for the day that will have the extra second, NTP time is unambiguous, 
even if Unix time isn't. This explains how NTP works with leap-seconds:

<http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/leap.html>

> in milliseconds

This is not fine enough. The current System.Time uses picoseconds, for 
instance.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA