Re:Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
by hvidgaard on Thursday May 16, 2019 @02:49AM
(#19926743)
It's almost as if we've tried something like that in the past, and the effort to avoid the worst issues was a monumental effort.
Re:Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
by tux1968 on Thursday May 16, 2019 @10:19AM
(#19929277)
Confess I'm not quite clever enough to know what you mean or to what you're referring.
Re:Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
by hvidgaard on Monday May 20, 2019 @02:59AM
(#19958101)
Y2K problem, because someone at some point decided that two digits was enough to represent years. Thus when 99 came to an end, the clock would show 00 for year. It was an undefined behavior how to interpret it.
The event was rather boring, because a huge effort went into making sure that critical infrastructure was "Y2K Ready".
So my point was that pushing the problem in front of us until it becomes too large to ignore, is not a good strategy when we're talking (it) infrastructure. Handling leap seconds every now and then are the lesser evil.
You hear a lot of people remarking that Let's Encrypt has made things better by requiring certs to be reconfigured more often rather than less. I know they're not exactly the same as time in general, but as a general idea, knowing that you need to do some fiddling often and automating it, might be better than growing complacent because nothing needs to be done for 50 years.
Might be setting things up for a lot of work when that next change comes due.