Development of CVS: Year 2000

This page is for details related to CVS's Year 2000 handling, and is aimed primarily at people who are helping develop CVS or conducting detailed Year 2000 testing programs for CVS. If you are looking for the high-level information, see our User-level Year 2000 page.

The short summary is that CVS 1.10 fixes most known year 2000 bugs, but CVS 1.9.26 and earlier have known year 2000 bugs.

Known bugs in CVS's Year 2000 handling:

• For CVS 1.10.4 and older. Relative time specifications for months or years, such as "next year" or "17 months" don't work if the date being specified is after the year 2000. Fixed in CVS 1.10.5 (fix checked in 29 Dec 1998).
• Note: this item is a bug in the CVS testsuite, not in CVS. For CVS 1.10.4 and older, if you run the testsuite with a machine whose clock is set past the year 2000, it will fail in the admin-13, admin-25, and admin-29 tests. CVS is behaving correctly; the testsuite is at fault. Development versions of the testsuite have a fix (checked in 1998-12-12).
• For CVS 1.9 and older (or, for certain OS/2 ports only, CVS 1.10.4 and older). If you specify a date to CVS (for example, in the -D option to various CVS commands) where the year is 2000 or later, CVS will abort with an error such as:

  cvs-1.9 [history aborted]: Can't parse date/time: 1 Jan 2000

  This bug was fixed by a checkin to lib/getdate.y on 24 Nov 1996, and the "rcs" test in the CVS testsuite tests for the fixed behavior. Or for the OS/2-specific issue, see the checkin to os2/Makefile.in on 29 Dec 1998.
• For CVS 1.9.26 and older, for the client/server CVS only. If you specify a date to CVS, in the -D option to various CVS commands, where the year is 2000 or later, CVS will abort with an error such as:

  cvs-1.9.26 [rdiff aborted]: diff_client_senddate: sscanf failed on date

  This bug was fixed by a checkin to src/client.c on 11 Apr 1998, and the "history" test in the CVS testsuite tests for the fixed behavior.