Re: date broken in coreutils-6.7 and new glibc-2.7

[Philip Rowlands]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Clemens Koller wrote:

> I have a problem setting the system date together with the time with 
> date -s. This happens since I migrated my embedded powerpc system to 
> the latest glibc-2.7. glibc-2.3.4 was working fine with same kernel. 
> Since I did a full toolchain bootstrap while upgrading glibc, lots of 
> stuff has changed.
>
> Conclusion:
> 1) date -s can only set either the date or the time, but it's clearing the 
> time or the date, then.
>
> 2) date -s cannot set both: date und time at once. -> resets to
> Thu Jan  1 01:00:00 CET 1970

There's nothing special about setting "date only" from the system call's 
point of view - it's just a number of seconds (and microseconds).

> address@hidden:~$ date
> Thu Jan  1 01:00:00 CET 1970
>
> address@hidden:~$ date -s 20071107
> Wed Nov  7 00:00:00 CET 2007
>
> address@hidden:~$ date -s 12:01
> Thu Jan  1 12:01:00 CET 1970
[snip repeats]

The rest of the examples show date working correctly, so let's focus on 
the above problem.

date doesn't re-read the clock after it's been set, so you should be 
able to produce the error with just a query:

$ date -d '12:01'

Does this return today's date or Jan 1 1970? It would be useful to see 
the system calls with strace; could you run the mis-firing command and 
copy the system calls?


Cheers,
Phil