[time-nuts] On the IETF leap-seconds.list SHA1

[John Hawkinson]

Umm, the presence of a copy of the IANA TZ distribution at https://www.ietf.org/timezones/ is not evidence of an "IETF leap-seconds list." This is bizarre, and probably a web server configuration error that even exists. The IETF is not involved in this list. I guess this shows why Google is an unreliable indicator of authority.

https://www.ietf.org/timezones/data/leap-seconds.list
is not a URL anyone should be depending on.

https://data.iana.org/time-zones/code/leap-seconds.list
is perhaps a better URL for the file in the tz distribution, but I'd hestitate to call it canonical. Start at https://www.iana.org/time-zones.

But then the tz database isn't an authorative source, either. Per the NEWS file:

    The 'leapseconds' file is now generated automatically from a
    new file 'leap-seconds.list', which is a copy of
    <ftp://time.nist.gov/pub/leap-seconds.list>.
    A new source file 'leapseconds.awk' implements this.
    The goal is simplification of the future maintenance of 'leapseconds'.

That is, it's just a copy of NIST's file.

Your email would make a lot more sense if you had included the URLs directly rather than referring to your source code and output file that happen to contain them.

--jhawk at mit.edu
  John Hawkinson

Anders Wallin <anders.e.e.wallin at gmail.com> wrote on Wed, 20 Dec 2017
at 13:51:21 +0200 in <CAPnVNRV=4gxKn5C3-Zh6zfqwK6NhjNcn9Qkr_rLhU-GkfzYZHQ at mail.gmail.com>:


> So I'm doing the typical Wednesday thing you might do, that is writing a
> small script for checking the SHA1 checksum in leap-seconds.list files.
> I came up with [1] which produces output [2].
...
> For the IETF file there seems to be one byte, a "0" at the start of the
> third group of 8 hex characters missing.
> 
> This is somewhat funny/alarming, since the IETF leap-seconds.list is the
> first thing that shows up (at least for me) on google when looking for
> leap-seocnds.list.
...

> [1]
> https://github.com/aewallin/leap-seconds.list_sha1_check/blob/master/leap_sha.py
> [2]
> https://github.com/aewallin/leap-seconds.list_sha1_check/blob/master/output.txt