Re: [Evolution] Bugs in birthday handling

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 10:26 +0100, Bram Mertens wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-01-01 at 21:09 +0100, Andre Klapper wrote:
> > Am Samstag, den 01.01.2005, 02:15 +0530 schrieb Sandip Bhattacharya: 
> > > In one contact I just created along with the date of birth (in 1945),
> > > the corresponding birthday calendar entry shows that the entry is marked
> > > for every year since the same date in *1970*.
> [...]
> > feel free to add comments to
> > http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=44382. :-)
>
> If I understand this correctly, all dates in evolution (or perhaps even
> in gnome) should be between 1970 and 2039. Why is this?

I suspect it's because times in Posix (not evo or gnome or linux) are
referenced from a single point called the Epoch - aka 1st Jan 1970.  All
time is measured as seconds from that point in an unsigned integer.
Time before that does not exist. :-)  (and as an aside - time after 2038
doesn't exist either)

You have to remember that the birthday calendar thing was an add-on (in
fact a bounty) to the original calendaring application - and in a non-
historical calendar you don't need to add entries before 'now', and the
Evo calendar was probably never designed to be historical.  I would
imagine that a quite extensive re-write would have to be done to make it
compatible with pre-1970 dates.

Pete

-- 
Pete Biggs :{)        pete @ physchem.ox.ac.uk   pete.biggs @ chem.ox.ac.uk
01865 275490 (Work)   pete1biggs @ gmail.com     pete @ biggs.org.uk