What is a leap second

Vincent Béron vberon at mecano.gme.usherb.ca
Tue Oct 29 13:12:26 CST 2002


Le mar 29/10/2002 à 13:55, György 'Nog' Jeney a écrit :
> 
> While I was looking through dlls/ntdll/time.c I came across the following
> two comments: "FIXME: Compute the number of leap second corrections here"
> and "FIXME: get the GMT offset here" What do these mean?
> 
> nog.
> 

Leap seconds are seconds which are added every few years (I think
there's been ten-something since 1970) to account for the difference
between the time that atomic clocks count and the actual position of the
earth around the sun, or something like that. 

Since they are added "as needed", you can only be sure of those which
have already been added in the past. The first FIXME would be to account
for those (after checking MSDN, I can't say if RtlTimeToTimeFields() is
supposed to do it or not).

As for the second FIXME, MSDN is very shallow on details of what is
taken into account and what's not (see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/kmarch/hh/kmarch/k109_4gfm.asp). So I can't say either.

Advice: use it on Windows and check the result.

Vincent




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