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0 pointsAnotherGoodName3y ago0 comments

You don't have dst offsets for the future either. Those keep changing. That's not a blocker.

The straight up truth is that we created something in between. Some parts of earth sun alignment are in the time zone abstraction layer and leap seconds are in the seconds count layer. There's no real cause for this and we should have moved to TAI to fix this blunder long ago.

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eternityforest3y ago

You don't have DST offsets at all in UTC, which is probably how you are storing timestamps, so you can always compute a delta between timestamps if you don't have leap seconds.

AnotherGoodNameOP3y ago

That's the whole point i'm making here. UTC and leap seconds could always have been separate in the same way timezone+dst offsets are separate. In fact leap seconds could have just gone into the timezone offsets directly and it'd all work fine (we'd probably still call it UTC +10 rather than UTC +10:00:27 but that's not a problem and to be honest we'd probably not bother at all until the offset was big anyway).

There's no reason this wasn't done many years ago except for a blunder on the part of CGPM which they are now working to correct.

layer83y ago

Well, in principle there’s TAI for that. But civil time in most countries is defined in terms of UTC/GMT.

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