Re: Redhat 7.3 time manipulation bug

On Wed, 22 May 2002, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

> > IIRC the spec is not _really_ broken - it still allows the correct
> > behaviour :)
>
> Yes.
>
> > The fact the ISO spec is broken usually means that at least one of the
> > big vendors involved in ISO spec creation must have had a broken
> > implementation at that time.
>
> Right. IBM.
>
> > Most likely they have fixed it by now ...
>
> Nope, though I don't know for sure. Anyone here have a recent AIX
> machine to test?
>
> > Does anyone know _any_ other libc that has this behaviour ?
>
> AIX and (I think) Irix.
>
> Trond, do you have a suggestion on how to get this addressed at the
> glibc level? Does someone within RH participate in glibc development?

Jakub Jelinek, Ulrich Drepper and others.

> If so, can we get them to champion changes which would comply with the
> standard but remove this arbitrary breakage?

Unlikely. They already saw (and participated, at least Ulrich) a thread on
this with Lamar. Their take is "this is the standard, you should do what
the standard says and not rely on
undocumented, non-standardized sideeffects.

> The changes would involve returning -1 from mktime() for dates before
> 1970, and using the tm_isdst flag to indicate whether a time zone
> translation was not possible.

--
Trond Eivind Glomsrød
Red Hat, Inc.