Re: [HACKERS] Re: y2k

Why should we state any differently then most Open Software products:

http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section4.html#4.11
http://www.gnu.org/software/year2000.html
http://samba.gorski.net/samba/sambay2k.html

How do we store our dates?  Same as everyone else...seconds since epoch?
If so, then its just our 'external representations' that would risk being
off, no?  And, as someone else pointed out, we display ours as 4-digit.



On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Thomas G. Lockhart wrote:

> > I am sorry to bother you with another compliance question (I am sure
> > you get many), but could you direct
> > me to were I can obtain a Y2K compliance statement regarding 
> > Postgres95 v6.3.2 for a Sparc/Solaris platform?
> > I need to provide this document to my systems administration team 
> > before I can install the dbms. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Hmm. I know what I _think_ about y2k on Postgres (no problem), but I'm
> not sure what your admin team is looking for here (besides an excuse to
> avoid work -- *slap* ooh, that wasn't nice was it?).
> 
> I'm not a big fan of holding open-source software to a legally binding
> statement which could confer liability ("jeesh, you have the source
> dudes, fix it yourself! And contribute back the solution!" :)
> 
> Anyway, if you have an example of what they are looking for, I'd be
> happy to look at it and write something up. I can imagine something
> which says:
> 
> 1) at the time of writing, Thomas Lockhart, a member of the loose
> confederation of the Postgres support team, is not aware of having
> received any reports of any problems in the Postgres code base related
> to time transitions around Jan 1, 2000.
> 
> 2) at the time of writing, in limited testing, which is documented in
> the included regression tests, there have been no reports of problems
> related to time transitions around Jan 1, 2000.
Aren't 1 & 2 saying the same thing?

> 3) at the time of writing, to the best of Thomas' knowledge, the
> assumptions Postgres makes about dates specified with a two-digit year
> are documented in the current User's Guide. (the significant transition
> year is 1970, not 2000.)
URL reference to this section?

> 3) any y2k problems in the underlying OS related to obtaining "the
> current time" may propagate into apparent y2k problems in Postgres.
This is basically what I read on most of the y2k statements...

> What do the rest of the developers think about this?
The only thing I'd mention/provide is a URL to the section of the
User's Guide so that ppl dont' have to go searching for it...other then
that, I'd say it sounds both accurate to what we know at this time, while
not leaving any of us open to "but, hey, you said there wouldn't be any
problems"...
Might it not be wise to add in a comment dealing with the
version(s) of PostgreSQL that this pertains to?  Something like
"referencing the currently released as well as development source trees"?
The only concern would be someone popping up and mentioning 1.01, cause,
well, they are still running that?

Marc G. Fournier                                
Systems Administrator @ hub.org 
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org