[mythtv-users] mythfilldatabase: Ignoring unknown timestamp format: 20161231235960

[Stuart Auchterlonie]

On 16/12/16 12:02, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 12/16/2016 02:38 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
>> Just a heads up since I'm getting a bunch of these from my daily
>> mythfilldatabase runs, looks like it is unhappy with the upcoming leap
>> second. Seems like it might also prevent it from inserting all the
>> other data too and not just the one bad program.
>>
>> The message appears to come from
>> https://github.com/MythTV/mythtv/blob/master/mythtv/programs/mythfilldatabase/xmltvparser.cpp#L170
>>
>> so it seems to be a QDateTime issue.
>>
>> http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qdatetime.html says:
>>
>>      Note: QDateTime does not account for leap seconds.
>>
>> I worked around it by inserting
>>      | sed -e 's,"20161231235960 +0000","20161231235959 +0000",g'"
>> into my tv_grab wrapper script.
> 
> Um, you do realize that there's no leap second, right?  Google says so.
> 
> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/making-every-leap-second-count-with-our-new-public-NTP-servers.html
> 
> 
> Time just flows 0.0014% slower in the period from 2pm on Dec 31 through
> 10am on Jan 1.  I suppose this means that we'll all get to celebrate the
> new years a little longer--though slower.  Oh, and make sure you
> compensate for this during the countdown to the ball drop or you'll be
> embarrassed when you get to 0 before everyone else!  Talk about an
> awkward 0.00014-second pause...
> 

That's not correct, there is a leap second occuring on the 31st
December this year [1]. However google have their own way of dealing
with such things.

Rather than actually inserting the leap second like most ntp servers
do, google intentionally drift the time of their ntp servers, such that
once the leap second has occurred, the time is correct for the post
leap second event. This has the advantage of not needing to hand hold
systems that potentially miss handle the leap second.

That's what they are documenting in the blog

Regards
Stuart



[1] - https://datacenter.iers.org/eop/-/somos/5Rgv/latest/16