[Discuss] Interesting linux date bug

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-03-04 14:05-0800 John Blomfield wrote:

> As I reported earlier there is no problem with Fedora 8 (Redhat's test bed). 
> It does not have this particular bug so there is no need for such drastic 
> treatment as Ub...... what was the name of that distro again?

LOL.

Actually, as a long-time Debian user, I prefer pure Debian (see below) to
Ubuntu (which I tried for quite a while before I went back to Debian).

> Fedora 
> updates stream into my computer on a daily basis.  I do take the point 
> however about static editions!  The benefit of switching to Fedora is that 
> all the familiar Redhat tools and utilities would still be available to the 
> CentOS user.

I have to admire Fedora (and Debian unstable) for attempting to package
cutting-edge versions into some sort of coherent whole, but moving so close
to the cutting edge from so far behind it might be quite a culture shock to
a CentOS or RedHat enterprise user.  According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux, a given RHEL edition
is supported for seven years. (That's worse than I thought.  What a horrific
task RedHat have committed to.  Can you imagine supporting either GNOME or
KDE from 7 years ago or a business training their staff to use those
versions?)

Fortunately for RHEL (and CentOS) users a new edition comes out every 18 to
24 months according to the same wikipedia article.  In any case, from what
Deid has said there is a more recent CentOS than what Peter is using which
clearly does not have the date bug that Peter encountered with the older
version of CentOS.

>From my perspective, 6 months behind the cutting edge is pretty ideal so
Debian testing is good for my needs.  That might be an alternative that
Peter (who apparently is already familiar with Debian on one of his
machines) might like as well if he decides to not go for the obvious which
is upgrading his CentOS computer to a more recent version to deal with
the date bug he found plus probably many others.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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