alt Hacker NewsResponding to a deleted comment:
> ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ...
The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely.
At $work around 2014 we had three different hardware GPS types which we used for precision timekeeping; some chips, daughterboards, and firmware. One day a leap second arrived -- it gets broadcast to aGPS hardware a day ahead of time -- and all three implementations handled it differently. One handled it, one did something else like ignore it, and I think one even bricked itself. That situation was less than bueno.
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Just here to reinforce your point.
The last leap-second I encountered (also the 2014 one) crashed my MySQL databases.
you wouldn't assume that it depends on time like that, because honestly why would it? "surely it's fine, NTP corrects drift of a second fairly frequently"- but a leap second is not a drift, it's something quite insane unless your primitives are solid. Nobody would test for this.
> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely.
There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation's problem, not ours): but given that people can't even get February 29th correct now, and it happens regularly, I don't see how a one-off event would be made to work. It'd be a huge coördination problem.
Just look at the introduction of the Gregorian calendar: it was slightly off since the time of Julius Caesar, but that minor error added up over time, to the point that to get the equinoxes/solstices back to where they 'should' be 10 days had to be removed with the Gregorian calendar. And because of politics (or a religious flavour) it took a long while for everyone to get on the same page.