Time Library Organisation

[Ashley Yakeley]

In article <87mzuu96x4.fsf at qrnik.zagroda>,
 Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> wrote:

> DJB (the author of libtai) disagrees with POSIX about what gettimeofday
> should return, and assumes that it actually returns what he wishes it
> returned.

It seems what should have been done was to create a patch to the 
kernel that allows the hardware clock to run on TAI but have 
gettimeofday return broken time as per POSIX, and have some other 
function to return TAI time. Perhaps someone's done this.

> > (2) We can convert TAI to UTC (and back) up to half a year in the
> > future.
> 
> Assuming that during the half of the year:
> - the Haskell compiler has been updated
> - and released
> - and installed where the given software will be compiled
> - and the software has actually been recompiled
> - and the program has been restarted (if it's running as a daemon)

Of course, even if the available clock uses broken POSIX UTC time, users 
might still want a leap-second table to convert to TAI.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA