[JdeBP]

There are actually two reasonable ways of handling leap seconds with gettimeofday(). The first, which is in actual use by a range of people, is to define that the kernel time is actually a TAI-10 count not a UTC count. Arthur David Olson's "right" timezone system does this. The second is to allow the microseconds count to go up to 2,000,000.

* http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/unix-leap-seconds.htm...

[klodolph]

I wonder how many clients handle that correctly. How many log files will have timestamps at "23:59:59.1500" instead of "23:59:60.500"? If you are going to break APIs you might as well make a new one instead.

And if you replace a simple API with one that requires distributing leap-second tables…

[creshal]

> And if you replace a simple API with one that requires distributing leap-second tables…

Not much worse than the distributed time zone tables we already need to update thrice a year. At least leap seconds aren't decided on by politicians.