Bug 137705

Summary:	[TRACKER] UTC vs. TAI problems
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Sascha Silbe <sascha-gentoo-bugzilla>
Component:	Current packages	Assignee:	No maintainer - Look at https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proxy_Maintainers if you want to take care of it <maintainer-needed>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal	CC:	as.gentoo, bangert, n-roeser, ulm
Priority:	High	Keywords:	Tracker
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---
Bug Depends on:	78351, 111555, 124188, 125755, 137708, 183716, 184484
Bug Blocks:

Description Sascha Silbe 2006-06-23 03:49:21 UTC

A whole bunch of packages in Gentoo has problems with the difference between TAI (time relative to cesium clocks) and UTC (time relative to astronomical obversations).
For an explanation of this difference and it's effects, please see http://www.thedjbway.org/clockspeed/leapsecs.html and http://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html.

The problems I've encountered in Gentoo so far were:
- OpenNTPd not setting the clock correctly (as compared with my radio controlled wrist watch)
- test suite failures due to hardcoded, not leap second-adjusted timestamps

I'm creating this tracker bug in order to group those - otherwise apparently unrelated - bugs together.

Comment 1 Sascha Silbe 2006-06-23 04:01:41 UTC

Bug #109472 is/was somewhat related. It's about updating the leap seconds table contained in glibc.

Comment 2 Sascha Silbe 2006-06-23 04:07:18 UTC

Wikipedia has a good description of TAI [1], also noting that UTC in fact is derived from TAI, so you might see why it's important to get the leap second correction right (instead of just ignoring it).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_time

Comment 3 Sascha Silbe 2006-07-18 12:22:39 UTC

Fix dependancy sense (was inverted).

Comment 4 Alastair Tse (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2006-07-18 16:30:35 UTC

err, what has curl got to do with this bug? the cookie timestamp was expired, not off by a leap second.

Comment 5 Sascha Silbe 2006-07-21 10:28:08 UTC

See bug #111555 comment #23 for an explanation of why it's listed on this bug.

Comment 6 Alastair Tse (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2006-07-23 14:00:20 UTC

so what exactly is the solution to all this?

Comment 7 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2006-08-26 01:05:22 UTC

(In reply to comment #6)
> so what exactly is the solution to all this?

+1

Comment 8 DEMAINE Benoît-Pierre, aka DoubleHP 2007-01-17 06:03:56 UTC

The fact we dont have a solution shall not prevent talking about the issue. That's why BTS exist: list problemes that do not have solution yet.

Please add "TRACKER" to "Keywords" field.

Comment 9 Víctor Ostorga (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2009-10-08 19:57:40 UTC

Closing due to depending bugs being fixed.