[time-nuts] time-nuts Digest, Vol 18, Issue 1

M. Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Sun Jan 1 12:53:41 EST 2006


In message: <004601c60ef9$e834ae50$9501000a at fakie>
            "Christopher Hoover" <ch at murgatroid.com> writes:
: 
: > Is there a convention for MJD with a leap second?
: 
: I think not.
: 
: See http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/timescales.html
: 
: Also not that POSIX time_t suffers from the same problem.

I've had many heated arguments with co-workers about what the right
thing to do here.  Do you compute the day as if it had an extra
second, thus breaking the ability to subtract two MJD numbers to get a
meaningful elapsed time?  Or, do you ignore the leap second entirely,
giving discontinuity around the leap second?

In the end, we opted to report MJD and HH:MM:SS.

Warner



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