Re: Emacs current-time-string core dump on 64-bit hosts

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU>
> Date: Mon, 03 Apr 2006 21:57:04 -0700
> 
> So it appears that my analysis was correct.  That is, the problem was
> unrelated to whether the working directory was a network drive.  The
> problem (which is documented by Microsoft) is that, if a time stamp is
> negative, ctime returns a null pointer.  This null pointer caused the
> circa 1995 edition of Emacs to crash, since 1995 Emacs assumed that
> ctime always returns a valid pointer.

The comment clearly mentions ``network directories'', and he says he
doesn't remember the reason.  Even if the argument passed to ctime was
negative, as long as that is a result of legitimate sequence of system
calls, IMO it is a very bad idea to signal an error.

> With that in mind I'd like to re-propose the following minor cleanup
> patch to the w32 code.  It doesn't fix any bugs, since Emacs no longer
> uses ctime.  But it simplifies the Emacs code

The simplification is minimal, unlike the risks, so I'd like to leave
those functions alone.