Re: Redhat/glibc and postgre time "bug"

On Tuesday 09 July 2002 11:39 am, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Lamar Owen wrote:
> > Red Hat also does not consider mktime(3) to now be broken.

> That is their opinion, of course.

Yes, it is. But they're not budging on this one.

> > Having said that, a patch for this exists in the current Rawhide. I am
> > loath to include such in an 'official' RPMset for many reasons.

> OK, what does that mean? That there is a fix coming in a future
> release? I don't know what Rawhide is.

I'm sorry -- Red Hat talking I am.

'Rawhide' is Red Hat's 'not ready for prime time super-duper testbed'
distribution. Cutting edge things, development work, etc, get put there. A
look at Rawhide is a look at what the next release of Red Hat Linux might
bear some passing resemblance to. At least it has been that way in the past.

The Rawhide distribution is available anywhere ftp.redhat.com is mirrored. Of
course, as Red Hat has stated many times, "Rawhide might or might not
install, work, compile, build, not trash your data, etc. You have been
warned... :-)" (paraphrase).

The patch is a one-liner to src/include/port/linux.h adding the line:
#define NO_MKTIME_BEFORE_1970

This basically kills timezones prior to 1970 for Linux.

We will either have to give up the pre-1970 timezones or figure out how to get
consistent results without the glibc mktime(3).

I don't agree with doing this -- but that portion of it is out of my hands.

As to what to do with this information....well, I don't know. I believe
mktime(3) is broken -- yet the ISO standards say otherwise. Just because it
has always been done that way -- does that trump an official standards body?
--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11