Bug#179139: libc6: invalid date from date -d 1969-12-31

[Stan Heckman <stan@schedar.com>]

Package: libc6
Version: 2.3.1-10
Severity: normal

$ date --version | head -3; date -d 1969-12-31
date (coreutils) 4.5.2
Written by David MacKenzie.

date: invalid date `1969-12-31'

I expected output something like like "Wed Dec 31 00:00:00 EST 1969", not "invalid date".

All dates before 1970-01-01 that I have tried seem to produce "invalid date"; all dates after 
1970-01-01 that I have tried produce the output I expect.

There is some discussion of this bug on the lists debian-user@lists.debian.org and 
kplug-list@kernel-panic.org near the end of January, 2003. 

-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux pipkin 2.4.18 #1 Fri Aug 16 15:40:44 EDT 2002 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C

Versions of packages libc6 depends on:
ii  libdb1-compat                 2.1.3-7    The Berkeley database routines [gl