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Re: year-2000 testing



Michael Alan Dorman wrote:
> 
> bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens) writes:
> > If you can do so, please try running your system with the date in the year
> > 2000 for a while. Richard Stallman asked if we had tested that GNU software
> > is free of year-2000 problems, and I think it's a good idea. Fortunately
> > we don't have too many COBOL programs :-) .
> 
> Seriously, someone grab a copy of the Packages file for the alpha
> dist---all of those programs have run with the year past 2000 for
> several weeks on my AXP box.
> 
> It comprises almost all of the GNU utils---or most of the fairly
> mainstream ones.
> 
> You see, the standard clock executable didn't know about the fact that
> the firmware kept the time based from 1980...

I had a similar experience.  About 4 months ago, the /sbin/clock program
kept setting the date to 2038 on my development machine.  Whenever I noticed
it, I would fix it, but everytime I rebooted, it would reset to 2038.  I'm
still finding files and emails that were written by me in the year 2038. 8)
(I'm just glad /sbin/clock was fixed in the next util-linux package!)

All in all, in the 4+ weeks I ran in the year 2038, the only major problem
I had was with make(1) not recompiling the proper C files (due to there being
a ~40 year difference in age between a lot of the source files).  8)

I'm not saying I've formally tested the 500+ debian packages on my machine
for the year 2000 problem, but the ones I did use seemed to work just fine.

Does that help?

Behan

-- 
Behan Webster     mailto:behanw@verisim.com
(613) 224-7547    http://www.verisim.com/


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