Y2K Technical Support Question

[jmegnat@us.ibm.com]

      I am trying to get answers to the below questions. Can you please help me
out.

Thank You,
John M. Egnat
IBM Project Manager
PSS Site and Connectivity
908-931-4516
internet id-JMEgnat@US.IBM.COM
JMEGNAT/Cranford/IBM
JMEGNAT/HQVMIC1


---------------------- Forwarded by John Egnat/Cranford/IBM on 10/21/99 11:39 AM
---------------------------

GNU Mailing List Maintenance <gnu@gnu.org> on 10/21/99 10:45:00 AM

To:   John Egnat/Cranford/IBM@IBMUS
cc:   James Fieseler/Warren/IBM@IBMUS, Sudhir Shah/New York/IBM@IBMUS,
      defreest@att.com, stabb@att.com
Subject:  Re: Y2K Technical Support Question




You could try asking these questions on our GCC users list,
help-gcc@gnu.org.  You might have better luck asking your own users -
these sound like _very_ basic questions.

For gzip, see the gzip.org site.  I think the maintainer claims
it is OK for Y2K.  It is only a compression utility, anyways.

I'm not sure Y2K patches are necessary for any of these.
Check the lists.

- Brian Youmans, FSF office staff

Here are some useful URLs with y2k information on free software:

http://www.gnu.org/software/year2000-list.html - An unofficial list
of GNU software with opinions on whether there are any potential y2k
problems, from those who have done tests or looked at the code.
(If you are doing your own testing, please send us your results.)

http://www.gnu.org/software/year2000.html - The official GNU refusal
to provide a y2k warranty, with an explanation of why we think GNU
software will have few y2k problems.  A copy of this is below the dashed
line at the end of this list.

http://www.linux.org/help/beginner/year2000.html - GNU/Linux and y2k.

http://www.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ.html#year2000 - Apache and y2k.

http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html - Perl and y2k.

http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/sambay2k.html - Samba and y2k.

http://www.xemacs.org/year2000.html - XEmacs and y2K (XEmacs is not
maintained by the Free Software Foundation.)

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ - Ghostscript and Ghostview and y2k.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Free Software Foundation does not provide warranties for its software.
We can't afford to. So we can't promise that GNU software has no Year 2000
bugs, any more than we could promise you the same thing about another sort
of bug. But we can tell you some reasons why such bugs are probably very
few.

The main reason is theoretical. GNU systems, and Unix-like systems
generally, represent a date/time as a 32-bit integer, counting seconds
from the beginning of 1970. This 32-bit count will overflow in 2038; but
there will be no problem in that year, because by then all systems will
have redefined time_t to be a 64-bit integer.

We also have some practical evidence that there are few problems. Some
users running a Linux-based GNU system, specifically Debian GNU/Linux,
used their machines for a while with the clocks set forward to the year
2000. They reported no special problems.

Of course, that is not an exhaustive test, but it suggests that there are
not enough Year 2000 bugs in GNU software to cause major or lasting
difficulties.

If you would like to help us eliminate any Year 2000 bugs, we suggest that
you set the clock on one of your machines ahead a few years for a few
days. You could also set it to Dec 31, 1999, and see if anything unusual
happens as the clock advances to the next century while you are working.

If you do find a problem, please send a bug report about it -- then the
bug will most likely get fixed in a new release, well before the year 2000
rolls around.

Whether you encounter a problem or not, we would appreciate hearing which
programs you tested in this way, and for how long a period of actual
working time. Please inform <gnu@gnu.org> of the results you get.

You can check that you are using the latest release of any particular GNU
program by checking one of our FTP mirror sites, or the list in our latest
GNU's Bulletin.
_____________________________________________________________________

The message above is also available on our web site at
http://www.gnu.org/software/year2000.html .


--
                                   Brian Youmans
                                   FSF Office Staff

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