[Ntp] Antw: [EXT] Re: CLOCK_TAI (was NTPv5: big picture)

[Ulrich Windl <[e-mail]>]

>>> Philip Prindeville <[e-mail]> schrieb am 05.01.2021
um
21:11 in Nachricht
<[e-mail]>:

> 
>> On Jan 5, 2021, at 8:51 AM, Magnus Danielson <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> I lean towards pushing the conversion requirement onto the NTP source
>> nodes just to achieve the intended cleanness of the rest of the
>> infrastructure.
> 
> 
> I’m going to push back against that.
> 
> I think that many protocols embed human-readable time notation 
> unnecessarily.  Take the syslog protocol.  Is there a reason why it couldn’t

> just have used TAI time in seconds and milliseconds (or microseconds), and 
> left it to some browser to do the rendering or “presentation” into a 
> human-preferred format?
> 
> Take video security cameras.  Do they need to know that a particular 
> timestamp corresponds to a minute/day/month/year/leap-second?  I don’t think

> so.  I think the browser there, too, could do the conversion.
> 
> Has anyone ever tried to run a “make” on a large code base just as a second

> leaped?  It’s a mess.  A lot of things get rebuilt unnecessarily.  And
that’s 
> with forward leaps.  If we ever need to shorten a day, I can’t begin to
image 
> how badly things will break.
> 
> This wouldn’t happen if we let machines deal with a representation of time 
> that’s optimal for them (i.e. simple and unambiguous) and held off on 
> conversion to human-readable format until it was actually necessary.
> 
> As a postmaster for 30 odd years, I’ve had to struggle with Received: lines

> having local dates and times that require me to pay attention to the UTC 
> offsets to be aware of when DST took place (if it took place at all) for
each 
> timezone that a server lived in as it handled a message.  It’s a mess.  
> RFC-822 should have mandated UT or Zulu time (as that was the best we had at

> the time).
> 
> Or having logs sent to me, or logging into remote machines, and having to 
> know the timezone of the provenance of those logs, then doing the math in my

> head to match that up with other events elsewhere.
> 
> Simple, unique, unambiguous, and universal time is what machines need.
> 
> Conversion to something that’s convenient for humans should be deferred 
> until absolutely necessary (and it may never be!).

Yes, it's quite easy to talk about the mistakes made in the past. Maybe it was
the KISS principle.

> 
> 
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