From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Nov 19 16:34:58 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id QAA17626 for chat-outgoing; Wed, 19 Nov 1997 16:34:58 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat) Received: from post.mail.demon.net (post-20.mail.demon.net [194.217.242.27]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id QAA17619 for ; Wed, 19 Nov 1997 16:34:53 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from james@jraynard.demon.co.uk) Received: from jraynard.demon.co.uk ([158.152.42.77]) by post.mail.demon.net id ab2007506; 20 Nov 97 0:17 GMT Received: (from james@localhost) by jraynard.demon.co.uk (8.8.8/8.8.7) id AAA09219; Thu, 20 Nov 1997 00:16:26 GMT (envelope-from james) Message-ID: <19971120001625.00506@jraynard.demon.co.uk> Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 00:16:25 +0000 From: James Raynard To: John Fieber Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Tell the world about Year 2000 Compliance References: <199711191807.LAA05380@mt.sri.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.81e In-Reply-To: ; from John Fieber on Wed, Nov 19, 1997 at 03:36:29PM -0500 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Wed, Nov 19, 1997 at 03:36:29PM -0500, John Fieber wrote: > > Some time back I grepped the source tree and found a number of > places where two digit dates were having 1900 blindly added to In what context? Something like year = tm.tm_year + 1900; is actually the correct way to do it. > problems and they may not be widespread, but I find it a little > disturbing how frequently Unixheads brush aside the problem as > something that only affects other systems. That sort of > arrogance is bound to backfire at some point. Can't argue with that. > Has anyone actually set their system clock forward and done > extensive testing? I tried it a year or so ago - just did a quick check to see if anything blatently obvious was broken before putting the clock back and rebooting. Although the problem isn't just a case of handling 1st January 2000 correctly - there may be programs which (wrongly!) assume 2000 is not a leap year. I vaguely remember hearing about some system which got past 1st Jan and 29th Feb 2000, only to miss out a day in the middle of March (OK, I think that one was a hardware bug). Not to mention things like using 1999 and 9/9/99 as synonyms for 'never'. Apparently a well-known UK organisation gave people "life" memberships by using an expiry date of 1999 (OK, this was probably a COBOL problem, but it shows you have to look for things which aren't immediately obvious). -- In theory, theory is better than practice. In practice, it isn't. James Raynard, Edinburgh, Scotland. http://www.freebsd.org/~jraynard/