ROADS: Millenium bug statement

ROADS

ROADS: stamping on the millenium bug

Testing ROADS against the year 2000 problem

Jon Knight has tested ROADS (v2b1 at the time) on a laptop by repeatedly setting the date into the future and trying the usual create/edit/search/play about with the admin centre tests. In total he tried for the BSI Y2K Compliancy which means:

31/12/1998 to 1/1/1999 to check existing calculations unchanged
27/2/1999 to 28/2/1999 to check existing calculations unchanged
28/2/1999 to 1/3/1999 to check existing calculations unchanged
31/8/1999 to 1/9/1999 first time that xx999 may be encountered (some systems use 999 in the date to indicate the last record in a file)
8/9/1999 to 9/9/1999 to check the 9999 issue
31/12/1999 to 1/1/2000 first time 00 occurs
27/2/2000 to 28/2/2000 to check existing calculations unchanged
28/2/2000 to 29/2/2000 to check 2000 recognised as leap year
29/2/2000 to 1/3/2000 to check 2000 recognised as leap year
31/12/2000 to 1/1/2001 to check change from 2000 to 2001
28/2/2001 to 1/3/2001 to check leap year recognition
28/2/2004 to 29/2/2004 to check leap year recognition
29/3/2004 to 1/3/2004 to check leap year recognition

...and ROADS seemed to work OK on these (this is under Linux 2.0.33 on a Toshiba Libretto in case anyone is wondering). It should be noted however that ROADS makes use of the UNIX "seconds since the Epoch" time (as returned by Perl) in several places (subject listings for example). Whilst there is no Y2K problem with this, there is a Year 2038 problem as that is when the 32 bit counter that the UNIX time is stored in will wrap round. Hopefully by then UNIX will have moved onto 64bit times (or better yet some arbitrary time structure) but as its an OS thing there's not much we can do about it (though we do have 40 years to come up with something if needs be).

Punters might also want to see the Perl Y2K info at http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html and the Linux Y2K stuff at http://www.linux.org.uk/mbug.html. RCS (used by ROADS for archiving deleted/edited templates) is also apparently OK. People should also of course be seeing their own hardware and other software (including other versions of UNIX) vendors to check on y2k compliancy that might pull the rug out from under the feet of Perl and ROADS. Note that old (1.1.x) versions of Apache aren't Y2K compliant but newer versions are.

Of course if any unforeseen troubles do occur, we'll do our very best to correct them ASAP.