On Jun 30, 2011, at 02:27, Robert Elz wrote:
And further, the initial request is also pretty meaningless, TAI is not (unlike UTC) a timezone, so TZ=TAI makes precisely no sense at all.
As best I understand it, TAI is just a count of seconds from its offset, and has no concept of years, months, or days, just seconds, and so attempting to use the localtime() set of functions on TAI data makes precisely no sense.
Unix-y systems keep time in POSIX "time scale" (?), and NTP uses UTC. Given that TAI is neither of these, if one would like to use a time scale that does not experience leap seconds, one need a way of telling the various time routines to translate the internal POSIX/UTC counters to a different "local" time. As I type this, my TZ=America/Toronto, and so the time is roughly: Thu Jun 30 07:20:50 EDT 2011 Thu Jun 30 11:20:50 UTC 2011 but if I set TZ=TAI, it would convert my NTP synced computer clock up by 34s: Thu Jun 30 11:21:24 TAI 2011 So yes, TAI is "just a count of seconds from its offset", but how does one tell a utility like date(1) to add those seconds? Hence my original question: if all these people who can't / don't want to deal with leap seconds want something that ignores it, what option would they have? Would a TZ=TAI be possible? (This may be moot if leap seconds are voted away of course.)