Nov. 16, 2015
9:42 p.m.
Ken Murchison <murch@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
Having studied up the tzfile(5) format and written some code to produce these files, I'm wondering why the files in zoneinfo-leaps include the leap records AND adjust the transition times by the appropriate number of leap seconds. This seems redundant to me. If the file includes the leap second records, why not let the consumer adjust the transitions?
Because the values are meant to be time_t timestamps, and for these files they're intended for a notional system in whose time_t 946684822 rather than 946684800 represents a date of 2000-01-01 00:00:00 UTC..