[Rd] .leap.seconds

[Prof Brian Ripley]

You don't seriously expect R 2.2.1 to know about events after its release 
do you?  And as the new leap second is not a bug, it will not go into a 
patched version.

I have been looking into this for R-devel, but there is a lot more to it. 
We really need consistency with the OS, and as this leap second was not 
even announced until 2005-07-04, probably most R platforms will not know 
about it.  Some systems count leapseconds in their clock time, but most do 
not: see ?DateTimeClasses.  So we need to find out if the OS knows about 
this leap second when we make internal adjustments, and even that is 
tricky as e.g. FC3 as originally shipped does not but the latest patched 
glibc does.  I am not convinced I have a good enough solution as yet.


On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, McGehee, Robert wrote:

> I glanced at the .leap.seconds object and noticed that it has not been
> updated for the most recent leap second that occurred 2005 December 31,
> 23h 59m 60s. See the IERS bulletin here:
> http://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/bulletinc.dat
>
> Moreover, after a more careful glance at the .leap.seconds object, I
> noticed that there are two incorrect entries. First, there was not a
> leap second on 1986 June 30, and second there was a leap second that was
> omitted on 1982 June 30.

A (harmless) typo.

> For a list of past offsets see this IERS table:
> http://www.iers.org/MainDisp.csl?pid=95-106
>
> Best,
> Robert
>
>> version
> platform i686-pc-linux-gnu
> arch     i686
> os       linux-gnu
> system   i686, linux-gnu
> status   Patched
> major    2
> minor    2.1
> year     2006
> month    01
> day      07
> svn rev  37024
> language R
>
> Robert McGehee
> Quantitative Analyst
> Geode Capital Management, LLC
> 53 State Street, 5th Floor | Boston, MA | 02109
> Tel: 617/392-8396    Fax:617/476-6389
> mailto:robert.mcgehee at geodecapital.com
>
>
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595