Re: Remaining critical bugs (IMHO)
21 leap-seconds have been added since 1970. Debian takes them into account,
while POSIX does not. The result is that Debian thinks there have been
21 more seconds between New Years Day 1970 and now than Solaris does. If you
set the time(0) time to be any arbitrary value, Debian should be 21 seconds
behind Solaris when it displays the local time.
Unfortunately, various things break. ext2fs validation software, network
time daemons, etc. So we have little choice but to do it the POSIX way.
About the best thing we can do to explain it is to say that POSIX time
is counting the time since 00:21 Jan 1 1970 GMT, and keep incrementing
that number as leap-seconds are added.
I think POSIX was rather arrogant in intentionally codifying this
mis-feature.
Thanks
Bruce
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Bruce Perens K6BP Bruce@Pixar.com 510-215-3502
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