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Comment by imuli

I did this for my systems a while ago. You can grab <https://imu.li/TAI.zone>, compile it with the tzdata tools, and stick it in /etc/zoneinfo. It is unfortunately unable to keep time during a leap second.

In theory, if you keep your clock set to TAI instead of UTC, you can use the /etc/zoneinfo/right timezones for civic time and make a (simpler) TAI zone file. I learned of that after I'd created the above though, and I can imagine all sorts of problems with getting the NTP daemon to do the right thing, and my use case was more TZ=TAI date, as you mentioned.

There's a contentious discussion on the time zone mailing list about adding a TAI entry. It really didn't help that DJB was the one wanting to add it and approached the issue with his customary attitude. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there though - like allegedly there's a legal requirement in Germany for their time zone to be fixed to the rotation of the earth (and so they might abandon UTC if it gives up leap seconds).

parent imuli 1 year ago

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