[dis-sys]

In 2022, there are not many international matters that can be agreed upon by US, EU and China at the same time. Getting rid of this stupid leap second disaster is one of those rare ones. US, EU and China all agreed that leap second should be eliminated. It is a disaster.

The whole leap second disaster is just beyond imagination - inserting a full second into the system during business hours in Asia when some of the world's largest exchanges are in trading session! When there are hundreds of millions time sensitive devices manufactured by tens of thousands different vendors at vastly different skill levels!

When compared with this leap second invention, Y2K problem is so harmless.

[avian]

Wait until you hear about the leap years! They insert a whole day, often right in the middle of the work week!

Too bad there weren't any computers around at the time or software developers might have convinced Julius Caesar what a disaster and source of bugs that will be for centuries to come. He might have dropped the whole idea.

[dis-sys]

> Wait until you hear about the leap years! They insert a whole day, often right in the middle of the work week!

That is pretty fine tuned given they only insert a full day. ;)

In Chinese lunar calendar, and probably other calendars as well, they insert a full month known as the leap month. Yes, you hear me right, 13 months in such leap years.

> Too bad there weren't any computers around at the time or software developers might have convinced Julius Caesar what a disaster and source of bugs that will be for centuries to come. He might have dropped the whole idea.

Indeed. Such 2000 years old garbage is just not very compatible with modern way of life in which lots of things are being changed. From memory, in a few years, the definition of a second will also be reviewed by the international community. The current definition based on some funny behavior of Caesium atom is no longer the best. UTC is another drama deserve to have more care.

[planede]

One major difference leap day is not inserted by adjusting clocks by 24*60*60 seconds into monotonic clocks. But leap seconds are handled this way in many time sources.

I think the concept itself is fine, but software developers screwed up implementing it when designing unix and NTP time, or how operating systems handle hardware clocks.

Now there are unix and NTP timestamps that don't refer to a unique time point due to leap seconds, as they were rewound by a second at the time point when the leap second occurred. Somehow nobody thought that it would be a good idea for unix and NTP times to be rewound by a whole day after a leap day occurs.

[toast0]

At least Caesar had a plan for managing the change. Gregory sure didn't and Alaska left Russia on Saturday, 7 October 1867 but didn't join the US until Friday, 18 October 1867. Lawless anarchy for 11 days because of meddling with the calendar!