[Not a subscriber, so please CC.] Hello, There's been some discussion of removing leap seconds from UTC, as some people need/want a more predictable and deterministic time scale. [1] Given that International Atomic Time [2] exists, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to reference it. Is there any reason why a TAI "time zone" ("TZ=TAI; export TZ") is not present for those that want to ignore leap seconds? I noticed that some Linux distributions have a "right/" directory [3] to deal with this in some way:
Two different versions are provided: - The "posix" version is based on the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). - The "right" version is based on the International Atomic Time (TAI), and it includes the leap seconds. [...]
- TZDIR=/usr/share/zoneinfo/posix TZ=Europe/Paris on a system with hardware clock set to UTC. - TZDIR=/usr/share/zoneinfo/right TZ=Europe/Paris on a system with hardware clock set to TAI.
Regards, David [1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/5/107699-the-one-second-war/fulltext [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time [3] /usr/share/doc/tzdata/README.Debian