Time to slow down and be more careful

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> gem at rellim.com said:
> > I guess you have not read my comments, and Hal's comments, to the bug where
> > we both show, in different ways, why the pivot is just a bug. 
> 
> I wouldn't call the pivot a bug, just unnecessary if the system time is 
> "close enough".
> 
> Without that pivot, things will screwup if the correct time is 2039 and the 
> system time is close to 1970.  That will happen in a just booted system 
> without RTC if it doesn't have something  else that gets a sane time.

Right.  You now understand what Mills's compile-time pivot was intended to hedge
against.  Thank you for pointing out that the implementation may be wrong; that
may need fixing.

> I just rebooted a Raspberry Pi.  Somebody is setting the system time.  I 
> don't know who/where.

I do.  There's a special hack to save the time at shutdown and restore it
at startup.  The assumption is that that sort of reboot happens fast enough
so that the restored time is not too horrible for syslogging.
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		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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