Meanwhile, making sure everyone agrees as to the kind of time they're talking about it hard enough.
Meanwhile, making sure everyone agrees as to the kind of time they're talking about it hard enough.
If they stop announcing leap seconds, everything correctly equipped for leap seconds will still work, and everything else that gets it wrong every time will also work.
And those of us who have to make the stuff that works right adapt to all the crap that doesn't and can't be fixed can do other things, instead.
We have IAT if you want a monotonic measure of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
Use the right tool for the right job. UTC is what it is. Trying to redefine it is as stupid as redefining a foot so 3 feet are a meter exactly.
Fixing UTC by simply not declaring any new leap seconds eliminates all problems. What used to break on a semi-regular basis stops breaking. Nobody suffers. Nobody pays. No problems surface.
Leap seconds have not sit well with me ever since I learned about them. Messing with the number of seconds in a certain minute a few times a year just seemed ... unclean.
So if fellow commenters are right, that without leap seconds it would take 6667 years for the time to drift just one hour, then leap seconds are absolutely more trouble than their worth, and we should drop it this instant and try to come up with a solution for that leap hour in the next six milleniums.
This is like people saying that we shouldn't have daylight savings so we should redefine GMT to not have DST. That is not only stupid but breaks all use cases where you care about historical DST.
This is why we have UTC, it's GMT - DST. People in 1960 could figure this out. Are we so incompetent that our grandfathers were better programmers than us?
Crap programmers' grandparents were no better than they are. We live with it all. All their code doesn't work right and won't be fixed.
But, stop breaking it with leap seconds, and it will stay not broken.