[toast0]

I think taking this step unilaterally is the only way it's going to be taken. Given that Google doesn't want to deal with leap seconds [1], and that the standards organizations have been debating removing leap seconds for years, at least they're publicizing what they're doing.

[1] for good reasons

[ryanobjc]

It isn't even so simple as "work with others" - the other people involved here aren't even thinking at this level. Leap seconds are an ugly hack that were inserted without any thought as to the impact on computer systems. We should not use them, they exist as a vanity project imo.

Remember when leap seconds caused ALL JVMs to lock up until restarted? Or kernel bugs? ick!

[JdeBP]

> Leap seconds are an ugly hack that were inserted without any thought as to the impact on computer systems.

No. Leap seconds were a rationalization of a prior system that really was ugly for computers. The conversion between TAI and UT(n) that was used before UTC involved table-driven algorithms with multiple rules and microsecond adjustments.

If you thought that six months' notice to add a leap second to /etc/leapsecs.dat is a huge imposition, then you you should try creating a computer system that can cope with rules like "for the next three months, from January the 1st to March the 31st 1964, you must add 0.001296 of a second for each day since 38761 and then add a further 3.240130 seconds".

Ironically, UTC and the leap second system are geared towards the same sort of timekeeping that computers do and away from the civil timekeeping that preceded it: a constant length second that can be measured with oscillators and electronic counters, being the basis for civil time; rather than astronomical calculation.

[tankenmate]

In effect leap time has been used since the middle on the first millennium BC, the Babylonians discovered the difference between mean solar time and sidereal time and had corrected clocks ever since then. In order to reconcile relative earth surface time with earth mean solar time meant that time had to be inserted or removed somewhere.

In the spirit of DevOps small frequent changes are better than big infrequent changes we have leap seconds instead of leap minutes, hours, days etc. In this way noon is still when the sun is at it's highest (+/- 0.5 relative earth surface seconds).

[Pharylon]

Leap minutes could be publicized a century before being implemented, making sure all libraries accounted for the, just like leap hours.

[tankenmate]

Which then means, if you have a library that can support leap hours, why not leap seconds? More frequent small changes is much better than infrequent large changes; at the very least it will disabuse programmers of poor understanding of time and how to track it properly.