Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 00:16:25 +0000 From: James Raynard <james@jraynard.demon.co.uk> To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Tell the world about Year 2000 Compliance Message-ID: <19971120001625.00506@jraynard.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971119152857.8550A-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>; from John Fieber on Wed, Nov 19, 1997 at 03:36:29PM -0500 References: <199711191807.LAA05380@mt.sri.com> <Pine.BSF.3.96.971119152857.8550A-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
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/
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19971120001625.00506>