[antoncohen]

For people talking about Google unilaterally doing this, it has been common to smear the leap second for the last couple years. Usually companies do it internally by having their NTP servers skew time, either with Chrony or `ntpd -x`. Standards bodies have not been able to react quickly enough to the need to smear the leap second in a consistent way. I'm thankful that Google has decided to run public NTP servers with consistently smeared leap seconds.

Here are two Red Hat articles on how to deal with the leap second, from 2016 and 2015:

https://access.redhat.com/articles/15145

http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/06/01/five-different-...

[JdeBP]

I hope that there are people on standards bodies who remember or learned what it was like before UTC when civil time seconds were not one SI second long, and in effect "smearing" happened all the time.