Re: Predictable Internet Time

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

On 1/1/2017 11:24 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> To have a complete solution, the way forward would be to require
> systems using PIT to use the 'time smear' approach that has been
> pioneered by Akamai and is now used by Amazon, Google, etc. albeit in
> slightly different and non standard ways.
>
> Using time smearing, a program will never emit the time value 12:59:60
> as demanded by the standard. Instead the leap second is added to the
> machine gradually over the course of 20 or 24 hours. This avoids the
> need to emit a time value that could cause a system to fail at the
> cost of a modest difference between the purported and actual value.

Smearing leads to differing interpretations of elapsed time for two reasons:

1) smearing isn't unambiguously specified
2) smearing doesn't match the clock standards set by the ITU (who
defines UTC)

A "complete" solution would have several properties:

- it would always indicate the correct UTC time
- it would calculate time differences accurately

There's no clear reason why that solution can't be split into parts,
e.g., using Unix time to calculate time differences and a (complex)
converter to deal with UTC leap seconds.

Joe