We discussed the following change as part of a proposed larger patch in late May when talking about the problems with sendmail 8.8.8 in Australia. The rest of the patch was done in a different way, but it seems to me that a fix is still needed for installations that want leap seconds, but also want to omit the links mentioned in the file "backward". Another possible fix would be to modify localtime.c so that it loads "Etc/GMT" rather than "GMT" to get the leap second info for GMT. =================================================================== RCS file: RCS/backward,v retrieving revision 1997.10 retrieving revision 1997.10.1.1 diff -u -r1997.10 -r1997.10.1.1 --- backward 1997/12/11 17:44:35 1997.10 +++ backward 1998/05/24 07:28:25 1997.10.1.1 @@ -38,7 +38,6 @@ Link Africa/Cairo Egypt Link Europe/Dublin Eire Link Europe/London GB -Link Etc/GMT GMT Link Etc/GMT+0 GMT+0 Link Etc/GMT-0 GMT-0 Link Etc/GMT0 GMT0 =================================================================== RCS file: RCS/etcetera,v retrieving revision 1997.11 retrieving revision 1997.11.1.2 diff -u -r1997.11 -r1997.11.1.2 --- etcetera 1997/12/29 14:31:50 1997.11 +++ etcetera 1998/07/20 19:15:00 1997.11.1.2 @@ -10,6 +10,12 @@ Zone Etc/UTC 0 - UTC Zone Etc/UCT 0 - UCT +# The following link uses older naming conventions, +# but it belongs here, not in the file `backward', +# as functions like gmtime load the "GMT" file to handle leap seconds properly. +# We want this to work even on installations that omit the other older names. +Link Etc/GMT GMT + Link Etc/UTC Etc/Universal Link Etc/UTC Etc/Zulu