CVS and the Year 2000

Concerned about CVS and the Year 2000?

We suggest:

• Don't worry about file formats; the file formats used by CVS are designed to continue to work beyond the year 2000. For example, the year in an RCS file is two digits if it is before 2000 and four digits otherwise.
• Do not plan to continue to use CVS 1.9 or older beyond the year 2000. Such versions of CVS have known bugs in their ability to handle dates beyond 2000. These bugs are fixed in CVS 1.10, and we recommend an upgrade to CVS 1.10 some time before the year 2000.
• With respect to whether CVS 1.10 is Y2K compliant, Cyclic and others have done some tests but it is hard to test everything; see the GPL regarding the lack of warranty.
• If you need someone to fill out a questionnaire or in general provide Y2K information beyond that on our web pages, see our CVS consultants page.
• The dates which appear in the output from the "cvs annotate" command contain only the last two digits of the year. This command will continue to function past the year 2000 but will print only the last two digits of the year.

For more information

The Millennium Bug page from uk.linux.org is a good page listing known year 2000 bugs for a variety of free software packages.

Linux and Year 2000 (Y2K) from Christopher B. Browne is a nice page, also focusing on free software and linux.

We haven't read the book Year 2000 in a Nutshell, but it is from O'Reilly so it can't be all bad.

For technical details on CVS and the Year 2000, see our Development of CVS: Year 2000 page, which is aimed primarily at people who are helping develop CVS or conducting detailed year 2000 testing programs for CVS.