Re: [art] Predictable Internet Time

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

On 3/28/2017 3:56 PM, Manger, James wrote:
>>> leap second smearing
>> We certainly cannot even consider standardizing a conversion (even if that
>> were our purview) between time scales that include smearing until there
>> are smearing standards.
> It looks like the most valuable IETF contribution would be standardizing one smearing scheme (& getting Google, Java, ... to agree to it).

Ick. IMO, the most valuable contribution is to recommend the use of TAI
or UTC, IMO.

>
>> A key point in this doc is that smearing makes things horribly worse,
>> not better in any way, except to delude users into thinking otherwise.
> Given that a well-defined smearing scheme allows a simple and precise mapping to UTC, it is hard to see how that can be "horribly worse".
Even if we say that all interval calculations and conversions are
equally messy or not, why introduce yet another standard when we already
have TAI and UTC?
> Smearing moves the complexity of solar-vs-atomic-vs-civic time and the resultant leap seconds to a place where a huge number of systems can correctly handle that complexity by "doing nothing", while systems that care if time intervals can be 0.001% wrong (if 24hr is the smear standard) can still be more precise by making well-defined adjustments.

Doing nothing means smeared times are always wrong. When that smeared
time corresponds to a day or year change in another time zone, you've
really messed things up. That means doing nothing either means your
wrong or you're really wrong. The only solution is to convert out of the
smear back to UTC, but then why bother smearing at all?

Joe