🚀 go-pugleaf

Someone asked me about Y2K and Linux, and I wrote the enclosed 
answer. Now they want to actually use it in some internal document,
so I thought I'd ask around for people to review it for accuracy.



I understand that Linux kernel doesn't have any year 2000 issues
(dates are kept as 32-bit integers denoting the number of seconds
since 1970, so this will last without any problems until 2^31 seconds
will pass on 03:14:08 GMT, Tue Jan 19, 2038, even for software that
incorrectly interprets the date as signed integer.  For correctly
written software it will be yr. 2106 when the date will overflow.

Applications rarely use the 2-digit format; I personally don't know of
any that does that.

The only place where you might run into trouble is because computer
hardware clock maintains the 2-digit date, so that loading the system
clock on bootup from the hardware clock would result in a 1900 date in
year 2000. This is easy to fix; simply, getting years 00 to 90 from the
stupid hardware clock will result in adding 2000, not 1900, to the
year, and we are good for 90 more years. Since Linux didn't exist before
1990, it is not going to cause problems :^)


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