I agree with Tim that it's a red herring that unix systems don't
normally have access to a TAI source.
The proposal under discussion is to use one time format for all
platforms. So maybe there's a minor difficulty in converting unix
time to TAI time; probably it's not as large as the difficulty in
converting VMS time (for example) to whatever other
platform-independent standard we were going to agree on.
When you have one platform-independent standard, you necessarily
accept that there are going to be conversion difficulties form the
native time format to the standard format. Converting from unix time
to TAI is one of the smaller such difficulties.
We could hack Dan's library so that it carries the leap second table
internally, and only tries to fall back to the file when the date is
out of range of the internal table.
I was about to start a discussion of what this would mean for calls
like
localtime(2000000000)
and then I realized that, as usual, I have no idea what the RFC is
actually proposing.
Mark-Jason Dominus [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I am boycotting Amazon. See http://www.plover.com/~mjd/amazon.html for details.
