Re: [Gnu-arch-users] s/GMT/UTC/

[Jan Hudec]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 09:54:30 -0700, Jeremy Shaw wrote:
> > UTC inserts leap seconds, so the date counter can't be easily converted
> > to seconds. GMT on the other hand stretches the seconds, so the interval
> > corresponding to some number of seconds is not defined.
> > 
> > The article at:
> > http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/onlinebib.html
> > contains some discussion of how POSIX time and NTP time should be viewed
> > and concludes, that it's appropriate to consider them UT, that is GMT,
> > rather than UTC.
> > 
> 
> This article gives a slightly different insight into ntp and leap
> seconds and UTC:
> 
> http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/leap.html
> 
> It indicates that under Linux(??) you can use ntp and precision time
> kernel modifications to keep your clock synced with UTC, even during
> leap seconds.

In fact, while the time_t counts only non-leap seconds, the converted
year/month/day/hour/minute/second-within-minute actualy does correctly
reflect UTC time, because the rollover happens when the UTC one does and
leap seconds are inserted when they are in UTC (provided it is actualy
synchronized, of course). It's just the second counter, that does not
match.

So after all the time points are in UTC.

It does not matter much though, since the difference is never more than
1s and that's the precision of the timestamp.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
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