[Discuss] Interesting linux date bug

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2008-03-04 10:14-0800 pw wrote:

> My version of Centos.
>
> Linux version 2.6.9-42.ELsmp (buildcentos at build-i386) (gcc version 3.4.6 
> 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-3)) #1 SMP Sat Aug 12 09:39:11 CDT 2006

I think this is a perfect example of one issue with enterprise operating
systems.  RedHat has to do an awful lot of work to backport bug fixes to the
_really_ old kernel 2.6.9, and it appears they missed one here (which I
assume the CentOS clone of RedHat simply copied).  Of course, from the great
market success of RedHat enterprise editions and the CentOS clones of those,
they are filling a strong market demand for an "unchanging" OS, but
computers (and especially Linux computers) are not toasters. Thus, I think
it is stupid for businesses to demand unchanging computer software because
(a) that ignores all the value being constantly added to non-enterprise
Linux distributions including fixes to bugs such as the one that started
this thread, and (b) makes the transition to the next version of the Linux
enterprise OS extremely expensive for the vendor (just to support old
versions that nobody else is interested in any more) and also the business
in terms of needed staff training for the abrupt transition, etc.  RedHat is
doing quite well now, but in the long-term I think businesses are going to
get a whole lot smarter about extracting the best value from the world-wide
efforts that improve the Linux kernel and huge amount of surrounding
software.  For RedHat's sake I hope they encourage that change in business
thinking rather than having to play catch up when business's realize what
they are currently missing by demanding "enterprise" software which is
supposed to remain essentially unchanged for many years.

Getting back to Peters' date bug, it looks like he does need to upgrade to
the next CentOS enterprise edition (assuming that exists) to fix this bug
(and probably many others).  Alternatively, he could try a non-enterprise
distro.  I could mention Ubuntu here, but I won't because that is much
too obvious.... :-)

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).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________