What is a leap second

Tue Oct 29 13:22:42 CST 2002

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 06:45:42PM -0000, György 'Nog' Jeney wrote:

> 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 this mean?

Just as there are leap years which have an extra day, from time to time
it's necessary to adjust the clock by adding leap seconds because IIRC, a
siderial day is not *exactly* 24 hours -- there's a little bit of drift 
which adds up over time and needs to be corrected for.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer