Re: Year 2000 & Debian
On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, Richard L Shepherd wrote:
> Not sure if this has been thrashed out before:
>
> Is Debian (or Linux in general) year 2000 *safe*? I'm not even sure what
> that means precisely, but I'm responsible for finding out round here and
> wondered if it's been discussed on this group.
Groff-1.10 had a couple of problems in some of the macro packages.
For example, grep '19' in the troff macro directory yields the following
oddities:
tmac.e:.ds td \*(mo \n(dy, 19\n(yr
tmac.gm:.el .ds cov*new-date \\*[MO\\n[mo]] \\n[dy], 19\\n[yr]
while tmac.gs has the correct
tmac.gs:.nr *year \n[yr]+1900
(This may all be corrected in 1.3.1 -- I don't have access to a 1.3.1
system now to check. I know it's been reported to the groff maintainer,
but I haven't checked whether the groff-1.11 fixes the problem or not.)
Now is this an operating system problem or an application problem? I
don't really care, and the end user who gets the wrong answer probably
won't care either.
Is this particular example a big deal? Certainly not. However, I do hope
it successfully illustrates that you shouldn't believe any blanket
assertions that Linux is year 2000 "safe" unless those assertions include
assurances that all the relevant library and macro support files have also
been checked.
Andy Dougherty doughera@lafcol.lafayette.edu
Dept. of Physics
Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042
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