New submission from David Morley <mor...@ai.sri.com>: There is a systemic error in the Python documentation on time (such as <http://docs.python.org/library/time.html>). The term UTC is used incorrectly in the documentation where the term UT1 should be used.
The difference is that UTC includes leap seconds, whereas UT1 does not (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time>). The conversion routines ignore leap seconds, e.g., (time.mktime((2000,1,1,12,0,0,0,0,0))- time.mktime((1990,1,1,12,0,0,0,0,0))) returns an exact multiple of 24*60*60 and does not include all the leap seconds added between those dates. Using UT1 is more sensible that using UTC, since with UTC it is impossible to know when future leap seconds will be added, and hence impossible to convert future times to a number of seconds past the epoch. ---------- assignee: georg.brandl components: Documentation messages: 78497 nosy: georg.brandl, luckmor severity: normal status: open title: Incorrect documentation - UTC time versions: Python 2.5 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue4775> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
