Upcoming GPS rollover

Fred Wright fw at fwright.net
Tue Mar 12 21:23:17 UTC 2019


On Mon, 11 Mar 2019, Eric S. Raymond via devel wrote:

> GPSes will roll over to their third era on April 6th.
>
> Those of us with constellations of test GPSes will need to take time
> to audit how much of our kit has gone toes-up.  Maybe none of it
> immedately, as manufacturers tend to pivod on their firmware release
> date, but we'll need to check.

It appears that I'm not the only one to think of using the leap offset to 
disambiguate the week number, but I don't know if any vendors have 
actually implemented that.

BTW, where did this term "pivot" come from?  I've never seen the word used 
in that sense outside this ML.  And aside from being apparently unusual, 
it encourages thinking about the problem in an incorrect way, which can 
lead to bad code.  The proper way to extend a modular date/time is based 
on a window, not an instant, with thought given to the positioning of the 
window in relation to the date/time used as a reference.

Fred Wright


More information about the devel mailing list