RE: more y2k issues... [was: *ping*]

["Marc W. Mengel" <mengel@fnal.gov>]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2000, Blanton, Sarah H. wrote:

> If you are still using 1.02 or 2.03b versions of hypermail, please read the
> rest of this message very carefully. 
> Older versions of hypermail (2.03b and earlier) are not Y2K compliant!
> The older versions of hypermail are not Y2K compliant. The problem is that
> all messages after December 31, 1999 have their year changed to 1970 for
> sorting purposes. Thus new messages after December 31, 1999 will start
> showing up at the top of the date order list instead of the bottom. 

It is actually slightly worse than that, in its attempt to convert
date strings of the form 01/02/00 to seconds since the epoch, it
tries to count *upwards* from 1970 to 1900 to count how many leap
years occur (what was wrong with multiplying by 365.24 and taking
the integer part is beyond me ;-) ) so it counts:
 1970, 1971,...,maxint,-maxint, -maxint+1,...,-1,0,1,2,...,1970
checking for leap years the whole way through, and no doubt finding
quite a few, which is why the net date-in-seconds ends up quite a bit later
than 1900.

So not only does it sort it in the wrong place, it spends an awful lot
of CPU doing so...