[tz] Proposed reversions, for moving forward

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Aug 11 07:14:05 UTC 2014


Stephen Colebourne wrote:
> This is a big issue as the date that is being used as the cutoff date
> (1970) is really not that long ago. Many people have birth dates
> before that date, and so have the potential to be affected.

This is too hypothetical, I'm afraid.  People's pre-1970 birthdays are 
typically recorded as dates, not as POSIX time stamps.  (That's true 
even for post-1970 birthdays.)

Although it's conceivable that an application could misuse the data in 
the way you describe, it'd be pretty weird to do that, and in practice 
it's not a significant problem.  We shouldn't let hypothetical misuse 
like that get in the way of cleaning out bogus and/or out-of-scope data.


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