On Tue, 26 May 1998, Olson, Arthur David wrote:
On leap seconds: having a single leap second file would eliminate the ability to have "rolling" leap seconds. (This was provided when, one year, the city of New York announced that the countdown for the dropping of the big ball that marks the beginning of the new year would run "3...2...1...LEAP...Happy New Year!", putting the leap second at midnight local time. The time zone data as distributed reflects internationally agreed leap-second-occurs-at-the-same-instant-everywhere-on-Earth behavior.)
Has anywhere (with a UTC-based time zone) ever _legally_ instituted such a move of a leap second? What Epoch do systems that use leap seconds use? I can't see any accounting in tz for the 1.999918 seconds of changes (frequency offset of 300 parts in 10^10 for two years plus a step adjustment of 0.107758s at the start of 1972) between the standard Epoch and the start of the leap second system, so do they actually use 1972-01-01 00:00:00Z - 730 days? -- Joseph S. Myers jsm28@cam.ac.uk