Re: Redhat 7.3 time manipulation bug

On 21 May 2002, Manuel Sugawara wrote:

> Trond Eivind Glomsrød <teg(at)redhat(dot)com> writes:
>
> > Relying on nonstandardized/nondocumented behaviour is a program bug,
> > not a glibc bug.
>
> The question is: how this thing didn't show up before? ISTM that
> someone is not doing his work correctly.

FWIW, I ran the regressions tests some time ago(probably before that
change to glibc) . Since the tests are known
to be broken wrt. time issues anyway (as well as currency, math and sorting),
it's easy to overlook.

> > PostgreSQL needs fixing.
>
> Arguably, however, right now is *a lot easier* to fix glibc, and it's
> really needed for production systems using postgreSQL and working on
> RedHat.

You're not "fixing" glibc, you're reintroducing non-standardized, upstream
removed behaviour. That's typically a very bad thing. If anything, it
demonstrates the importance of not using or relying on
unstandardized/undocumented behaviour (and given that time_t is pretty
restrictive anyway, you'll need something else to keep dates. It doesn't
even cover all living people, and definitely not historical dates).

> > Since we ship both, we're looking at it, but glibc is not the
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> The sad true is: you only answered when the 'Complain to Red Hat'
> statement appeared, not a single word before and not a single word
> when the bug report were closed. I'm really disappointed.

The bug wasn't open for long, and was closed by someone else.

> The nice thing is: glibc is free software

Also, notice that this was where the fix came from: The upstream
maintainers (some of whom work for us, others don't).

--
Trond Eivind Glomsrød
Red Hat, Inc.