Re: formatting a date when some nulls exist

Eric Walstad <eric(at)walstads(dot)net> writes:
> [ewalstad(at)uluwatu ewalstad]$ uname -a
> Linux uluwatu 2.4.18-10 #1 Wed Aug 7 11:39:21 EDT 2002 i686 unknown

Ah, you're using the new-and-"improved" glibc. I'll bet you have dates
in your table that precede 1/1/1970? The glibc boys decided (quite
arbitrarily) that mktime(3) should stop supporting pre-1970 dates, and
that in turn broke a number of Postgres operations.

I just today committed a fix that works around this problem. It'll
be in PG 7.3 if it survives beta testing. I'm afraid I don't have any
very good answer for 7.2 ... but do complain to your Linux distributor
that mktime() is broken. Because it is, and the glibc authors need to
hear about it often enough to realize that they made a stupid decision.

regards, tom lane