bug#26164: time-difference mishandles leap seconds

[Andy Wingo]

On Sat 18 Mar 2017 23:41, Zefram <address@hidden> writes:

> Computing the duration of the period between two UTC times, using
> SRFI-19 mechanisms:
>
> scheme@(guile-user)> (use-modules (srfi srfi-19))
> scheme@(guile-user)> (define t0 (date->time-utc (make-date 0 59 59 23 30 6 
> 2012 0))) 
> scheme@(guile-user)> (define t1 (date->time-utc (make-date 0 1 0 0 1 7 2012 
> 0)))
> scheme@(guile-user)> (time-difference t1 t0)
> $1 = #<time type: time-duration nanosecond: 0 second: 2>
>
> The two times are 2012-06-30T23:59:59 and 2012-07-01T00:00:01, so at
> first glance one would expect the duration to be 2 s as shown above,
> the two seconds being 23:59:59 and 00:00:00.  But in fact there was
> a leap second 2012-06-30T23:59:60, so the duration of this period is
> actually 3 s.  The SRFI-19 library is aware of this leap second, and
> will compute the duration correctly if it's translated into TAI:
>
> scheme@(guile-user)> (time-difference (time-utc->time-tai t1) 
> (time-utc->time-tai t0))
> $2 = #<time type: time-duration nanosecond: 0 second: 3>
>
> The original computation in UTC space should yield a result of 3 s,
> not the 2 s that it did.  Since 1972, the seconds of UTC are of exactly
> the same duration as the seconds of TAI.  (They're also phase-locked to
> TAI seconds.)  Thus the period of three TAI seconds is also a period of
> three UTC seconds.  It is not somehow squeezed into two UTC seconds.

Makes sense to me.  Would you like to submit a patch and test case?  I
would be happy to apply it.

Andy