Re: [Ntp] NTPv5 draft

[Warner Losh <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 12:12 PM Hal Murray <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> > But much of that info need not be at the lowest-level time authentication
> > bootstrapping since there's overlap with other areas and services (the tz
> > database, for example).
>
> I think an RFC for NTPv5 should collect things like that.  The particular
> one
> that sentence brings up is leap-seconds.
>
> It's a long way from Paris to my desktop.  I don't thing an RFC has to
> totally
> solve that particular problem, but if it doesn't provide a good solution,
> it
> should have a section that describes the problem, explains what it does
> provide and what it expects some part of the environment to provide.
>

For leap seconds in particular, whatever solution you come up with has to
cope with 'late' discovery of leap seconds in a way that's at least
predictable, even if there's uncertainty until you have final knowledge.
The problem need not be solved entirely, but some reasonable bounds can be
used so the 'typical' error from leap seconds falls within those bounds as
an 'ordinary error' to the largest degree possible.

Warner