Re: Bug: Status/Summary of slashdot leap-second crash on new years 2008-2009

From: Nick Andrew
Date: Tue Jan 06 2009 - 20:17:31 EST


On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 09:40:58AM +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > UTC equivalent to conversion on the naive basis that leap seconds are ignored and all
> > years divisible by 4 are leap years. This value is not the same as the actual number of
> > seconds between the time and the Epoch, because of leap seconds and because clocks are not
> > required to be synchronized to a standard reference.
>
> I'm not sure what you are quoting from but it is out of date on the
> subject of leap years.

"man 2 time" on Debian Lenny. The treatment of leap years looks ridiculous, but
within the context of a 32-bit time_t, all divisible-by-4 years between 1901 and
2038 are leap years. It's a bit of a problem for 64-bit time_t though.

Nick.
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