mktime() like function to produce GMT?

[Charles G Waldman]

Guido van Rossum writes:

 > Few clocks in the world are
 > accurate enough to care about leap seconds.  

A cluster of (rather ordinary) machines running NTP easily reaches
this level of precision.
 
 > The rest of us occasionally synchronize with a master clock.  I
 > don't care about leap seconds and never will.

It's quite important in astronomical applications.  I know, for
instance, that the people here working on the Digital Sky Survey worry
about leap seconds.