Comment 9YEF Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years....

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June Will Be 1 Second Longer

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A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2015-05-28 09:06 (#9XP1)

...but I simply don't understand the problem.
It's possible that programs not equipped to handle the extra second could have an issue.
What programs? If the clock is not correct I might have a minor problem with builds. I might recompile more than necessary. So What? But crashes? Especially so boring systems like websites? Possibly "lightly" corrupt databases, yes. Perhaps the order of a few posts mixed up, yes. This should be all. I'd probably have think hard how to crash a program on purpose just because the time is one second off.

Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 2, Interesting)

by seriously@pipedot.org on 2015-05-28 10:12 (#9XSV)

I remember reading that technical post on Google blog about problems they had with leap seconds and how they fixed them.

http://googleblog.blogspot.be/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html

The section "Why time matters at Google" might especially be of interest ;)

Re: A bit embarrassing... software developer for years.... (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-05-28 15:52 (#9YEF)

Thanks, I hadn't read that and it appears that the problem is:
Computers traditionally accommodate leap seconds by setting their clock backwards by one second at the very end of the day
The "Time moved backwards by more than 1 second" error from dovecot now makes perfect sense. That this can lead to locking and concurrency issues demonstrates leap seconds are incorrectly implemented. As we are no longer in Nineteen-Seventy-Fucking-Nine; I stand by my original point!

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by evilviper@pipedot.org on 2015-05-31 06:22