| >Can anybody tells me if DCE is fully compatible with 2000 ???
I'll assume you're asking whether or not DCE is Year 2000 (Y2K)
compliant.
First off, there is not yet a "standard" that I am aware of
that a developer can check his software against to see if
it is Y2K compliant. There is work under way to hopefully
develop one.
In brief, Digital's stance is to make sure our code will
run without a problem when the clock flips over in a little
under 1,000 days. Digital also wants to ensure that all of
our software uses 4-digit representation for the year fields.
The target delivery date for this is January 1, 1998.
Here at DCE we have just finished a first pass sweep of our
entire code base. We searched for the words 19, year, date,
time, etc. and found 200,000 occurrences. From that search
we found that we have a number of instances where we
represent a year field as two characters. Most of these
occurrences are in the security code. It does appear,
however, that in most cases the underlying representation of
the date is ok. In other words we sometimes display or
request that the user enter a 2-digit year field. However,
the underlying software converts and stores the field as a
4-digit field. We do have one date routine that does not
appear to be converting the date properly. We are still
investigating that section of code to see the possible
problems this might cause.
Based on Digital's stance and our findings to date, DCE
is NOT Y2K compliant at this time.
In order to test our fixes for our known problems, and
to also make sure that we did not miss anything in our
code sweep, we are setting up a small network of machines.
We will then move the date up to the late in 1999 and
we will let the date roll over and observe how DCE
handles the year 2000.
To date, we have set up a single machine and set the date
forward to December 31st, 1999. We then set off a longish
running DCE test program, and watched the date roll over.
DCE continued to run without a problem. However
encouraging, that was just one test.
We are hoping to wrap up testing by late March or mid April.
We'll then implement fixes and will create an ECO for
version 2.0a of DCE. Hopefully that will be happening in
the middle part of this year. After testing, the ECO will
hopefully be available by Oct/Nov.
To my knowledge, Digital will not be releasing a Y2K
compliant version of v3.2 or earlier of Unix. Given that,
we are not planning on releasing a Y2K compliant 1.3* or
earlier version of DCE.
Hope this helps.
Tom Sweeney
DCE Engineering
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| Given the comments in .1 about not having a Y2K compliant
version of DCE in V1.3*, am I right in assuming that we
will therefore have to be running UNIX V4.0 (or later),
with the new threads standard, before 2000?
How about VMS platforms? All my DCE customers are running
OpenVMS V5.5-2 or V6.* - none are running V7. Will there
be a version of DCE that is Y2K compliant on one of these
platforms, or will my customers be forced to move to
OpenVMS V7.* before 2000 (and will that involve the same
migration of our threads code)?
Thanks,
Cameron
|
| >will therefore have to be running UNIX V4.0 (or later),
>with the new threads standard, before 2000?
The Y2K version UNIX that will be Y2k compliant will
be (to my knowledge, and this may change) a V4.* version.
I'm not sure if they'll be calling it V4.0c or something
else. The target date for that release is on or before
January 1, 1998. Regardless, at this time there are no
plans to release a V3.* or earlier version of UNIX. The
next major version of UNIX will also be Y2K compliant,
but it's not scheduled to ship in the time frames
necessary.
For more information on Y2K issues, please reference
the Year 2000 Project for Digital Unix home page at:
http://www.zk3.dec.com/y2k
Tom
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