Re: Redhat 7.3 time manipulation bug

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>

From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
To: Trond Eivind Glomsrød <teg@redhat.com>
Cc: Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org>, Manuel Sugawara <masm@fciencias.unam.mx>, PostgreSQL Hackers List <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2002-06-07T05:11:22Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Trond Eivind Glomsrd wrote:
> On Tue, 21 May 2002, Lamar Owen wrote:
> 
> > On Tuesday 21 May 2002 11:04 am, Manuel Sugawara wrote:
> > > I see. This behavior is consistent with the fact that mktime is
> > > supposed to return -1 on error, but then is broken in every other Unix
> > > implementation that I know.
> > 
> > > Any other workaround than downgrade or install FreeBSD?
> > 
> > Complain to Red Hat.  Loudly. However, as this is a glibc change, other 
> > distributors are very likely to fold in this change sooner rather than 
> > later. 
> 
> Relying on nonstandardized/nondocumented behaviour is a program bug, not a 
> glibc bug. PostgreSQL needs fixing. Since we ship both, we're looking at 
> it, but glibc is not the component with a problem.

No one has really answered the question --- if the way PostgreSQL is
using mktime() for pre-1970 dates is wrong, why do timezone databases
have pre-1970 timezone information?

I assume Linux does or the old mktime() wouldn't have worked for
pre-1970 dates.

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