[tz] problems with unsigned 32-bit time_t coming up

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon May 27 21:58:01 UTC 2013


I vaguely recalled someone reporting trouble with the tz database
on NetBSD or some other BSD in the past few months.  The gist of it
was that this platform has 32-bit 'long' and 64-bit 'time_t', and
the tz code didn't play nicely on such a system.

To try to catch this sort of thing I'd like to add support for trying
different time_t types, even if they disagree with the system's
time_t.  I'll send a couple of proposed patches to the list to do that.
I'll then follow up with a report of a bug in the reference
implementation that is discovered by the patches, when configured
to run with an unsigned 32-bit time_t.  This isn't the NetBSD
problem, but hey! at least there's an easy-to-run test
case that illustrates the bug.


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