Ian Batten <[email protected]> wrote: > > There are, for instance, ongoing Y2K-related issues. > [Citation Needed]
I am continuing to deal with Y2K fallout issues in 4.3BSD-Quasijarus to the present day, as it becomes apparent to me that my initial fixes made just before the Y2K moment aren't good enough in the long term. The most recent code change I've made in connection with Y2K was just a few months ago in 2011-07: I have finally changed SCCS to use 4-digit years instead of just the last two digits. The change I had made earlier (just before the Y2K moment) maintained 2-digit years, but made it roll over cleanly from 99 to 00. Ditto in sendmail, troff and other places: I had kept 2-digit years almost everywhere and merely fixed things up so that 99 was followed by 00 rather than 100 or some other garbage. It was only years later that I slowly realized bit by bit that it was a poor solution and that the right thing to do was/is to move to full AD year numbers. If my memory serves me right, it was 2004 when I finally implemented the RFC 1123 change of mail header dates from 2-digit to 4-digit years, i.e., in early 2004 I was still sending mail with dates reading xx Jan 04 and such. The conversion to 4-digit years still isn't complete: 4.3BSD-Quasijarus troff and nroff still have my old 2-digit hack, such that \n(yr currently reads 12. > The set of equipment that needs any time other than civil time is > vanishingly small. It isn't just equipment that matters, it's also people. Every living person has an inalienable right to choose which timescale s/he wishes to use in his/her personal life. Many people have chosen to live their lives on mean solar time, and up to now have been relying on UTC to provide a low-cost readily accessible form of it. (Low cost meaning not having to operate one's own high-precision observatory and flywheel timekeeper, as each time station had to do in the pre-atomic days.) By fundamentally redefining the meaning of UTC (previous minor redefinitions were mere technical changes as to means of achieving the unchanged goal of serving something that can pass for MST, hence a red herring) without changing the name, you are attempting to force other people to change their personal timescales without them knowing it. That is called fraud and ought to be subject to criminal prosecution. > The question is, should the rest of us be obligated to use a time scale which > causes us difficulties which we could fix easily were it not for the needs of > a small scientific community? If you prefer a leapless atomic timescale for YOUR personal life, you have every right to it. But pick a new name for it: you have NO right to usurp the name "Universal Time" which others have already defined to be THEIR timescale, suited to their purposes rather than yours. MS _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
