Re: [DNSOP] Benjamin Kaduk's Discuss on draft-ietf-dnsop-dns-capture-format-08: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Tony Finch <[e-mail]>]

[ trim CC: list due to off-topic tangent ]

Brian Dickson <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Doesn't UTC actually derive its time from TAI plus/minus leap seconds?

It's more complicated than that :-)

Strictly speaking, TAI is a paper clock, which is published as
retrospective corrections to national time lab reference clocks. In
practice what the general public has access to are time signals that trace
back to national versions of UTC, because those are the continuously
maintained reference timescales. GNSS time signals are an exception
because they mostly lack leap seconds, so their offset from TAI is fixed
to within some precision. But GPS time is only roughly TAI-19s.

> Why isn't it already available to use as a time zone?

Timezones on Unix have to be defined wrt POSIX time (because that's how
localtime() works), and POSIX time is a lossy representation of UTC, so
you can't get TAI that way without lossage. There were some experiments
defining TZ based on a TAI-ish non-standard time_t (the "right" aka wrong
timezones) but they aren't usable on a POSIX system. (But note the epoch
for the "right" timezones is 10s different from the SMPTE PTP epoch.
Sigh.)

Tony.
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