[anderskaseorg]

Except people want to be able to talk about times years in the future despite not knowing the number of leap seconds that may happen in the intervening time. It is more useful in most fields to talk about an event happening every N years/months/days than an event happening every N seconds. Most people do not want a leap second to shift their scheduled event from 10:00:00 every Monday to 9:59:59 or 10:00:01 in the name of using a whole number of 86400-second intervals.

[nshepperd]

If you want to say "10:00 every Monday" then say "10:00 every Monday" and accept that what you have is not an unambiguous point in time, nor an integer, but a calendar event that may occur at some time in the future depending on geopolitical changes to the local time zone and the rotation of the earth.

Mutilating all timestamps and network time representations by adding a variable unknown step function (the leap second "correction") in order to preserve the illusion that days are always 86400 "seconds" long doesn't help solve this problem at all.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> Except people want to be able to talk about times years in the future despite not knowing the number of leap seconds that may happen in the intervening time.

Doesn't the (TAI, leap second count) tuple solution work for this? Maybe I misunderstand the purpose, but you could use the leap second count to figure out how many seconds the TAI is off by.

But that doesn't matter, because date intervals shouldn't be represented with seconds anyway. Months and years have different lengths.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

…I forgot to mention this in my original comment, but real-world wall-clock time is in any case discontinuous due to daylight savings time and other timezone changes. This means that it's not only months and years that change in length, but days and weeks too.

[wereHamster]

You can not represent "Next Monday at 12:00" with a tuple (TAI, leap second count), because you don't know how many leap seconds there should be. Or maybe you know for next Monday, but you definitely don't know for the Monday in a year, as leap seconds are only announced ~6 months in advance.

[beering]

I think you cannot represent "Monday in a year at 12:00" with a simple integer either, right? For example, the king of the country may decide to cancel DST for the year. Either way you would have to store it as a calendar event and figure out the exact time once you're closer.

[dom0]

You should store that similar to this:

    begin = (today, 12:00) (eg. 2017-01-01T12:00:00)
    repeat = RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;COUNT=1;BYDAY=MO

Note that "begin" is usually something software figures out itself.

[jsmeaton]

I think this is solved by storing an event date as UTC (since we can't always know how many leap seconds will be required), but when triggering an event, we calculate the UTC from TAI + Leap Seconds.

An event in the future isn't necessarily a known number of seconds away, which I think is the point you were trying to make. But the parent comment wasn't suggesting all instances of time should be stored as (tai, leap seconds). Calculating a UTC value from (tai, leap seconds) is trivial, but if the thing you care about is the UTC value then that's what you store.

[manarth]

Sometimes it's best to store a scheduled events as "Event localtime" and "Timezone" (where timezone is a named description - e.g. "Europe/Madrid" - rather than an offset - e.g. "+1:00").

This allows the record to stay consistent, even if there are changes to the local time rules - e.g. leap seconds, daylight savings, timezone offset.

Imagine a tech-camp had been planned in Cairo, Egypt, to start on 9am on July 10, 2016: that would have been scheduled for 06:00 UTC. When Egypt cancelled daylight savings with three days notice, that record should then have been 07:00 UTC.

[jsmeaton]

Yup, I'm aware of this and should have mentioned it in my comment. Thanks for the follow up.

As an aside, how often do the tz databases for each language get released? Are they usually responsive to notices 3 days out?

Edit: I went looking into the pytz release for the Cairo example from parent.

Olson Timezone Database:

Release 2016f - 2016-07-05 16:26:51 +0200

https://github.com/stub42/pytz/commit/03a4e9b31dd90f3dace1eb...

Pytz:

Release 2016.6 - 2016-07-13

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytz/2016.6

So even if the tz database is up to date, there's no guarantee that various library usages of the tz database will be correct for these kinds of changes. Interesting.

[manarth]

I just came across a note about Morocco, which entered daylight savings time in March 2016, but then left daylight-savings in June for 35 days, re-starting daylight-savings in July [1].

I've read that the explanation for this temporary suspension of daylight-savings is Ramadan [2], and Ramadan is dependent on the observed sighting of the new moon - so you can't necessarily predict the date in advance.

I ended up coming across that after looking for an explanation for something bizarre I experienced on a trip to Morocco in March 2016…with my iPhone set to use "Marrakesh, Morocco", the time on the phone displayed correctly, but the time on my sync'd Apple watch was an hour out. I think I ended up manually setting it to Paris time to get the correct time, but never did get an explanation for the difference.

So even across two devices from the same manufacturer, theoretically sharing the same date-time information, they can be inconsistent.

Conclusion: time is hard!

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/time/change/morocco/tanger?year=...

[2] http://codeofmatt.com/2016/04/23/on-the-timing-of-time-zone-...

[synotna]

Anything less than 2 weeks is a gamble; I follow the time zone list closely and go out of my way to poke some maintainers of libraries we depend on when something like the Egypt change happens

[dom0]

Another neat example in the "UTC ain't always the right thing to do" category.