John Hawkinson wrote:
I do not think we can fairly say "often" used, or "often" combined with POSIX time.
Although it's pretty common, we indeed don't have to say "often".
as this is more accurate than strict POSIX time
I don't see how the accuracy or precision
With leap smearing, the ideal clock is at most 0.5 s off UTC, as opposed to being at most 1.0 s off with strict POSIX time.
we don't have to say anything.
Given the popularity of leap smearing, and the fact that this Makefile section advises users whether to use "posix" or "right" time, the section should say something -- otherwise people are more likely to incorrectly choose "right" time on a system that uses leap smearing.
The biggest problem we have with leap smearing is that smeared time is not clearly traceable.
Yes, that would be a nice problem to fix somehow. Perhaps append "-A" to the time zone indication when the clock is using AWS-style leap smearing? And we could append "-P" for strict POSIX time (hmm, but that's the default, so perhaps not....). Just thinking out loud. Anyway, it's not a problem we can easily fix just by changing Makefile comments. Proposed Makefile patch attached.