[Savannah-help-public] Incorrect time on fencepost?

[Kaloian Doganov]

Hello!

I've noticed that the system time on fencepost.gnu.org and
cvs.savannah.gnu.org and differs.  It looks like fp's clock is about 2
minutes in the past.

The difference shows when one have a CVS working copy on fp and commits
a file with keywords ($Id$, $Date$, etc.).  Keyword expansion leads to
automatic update after commit, and the timestamp of the file in the
working copy is set to about two minutes in the future.

This happend to be a problem for GNUnited Nations (GNUN, the gnu.org
internationalization system that is being deployed these days).  GNUN
uses GNU Make to "compile" some files of the web site based on other
files and then automatically commits them.  Later it gets confused when
timestamps of "source" and "target" files are unusual.

The problem is similar to the one reported by Chris Hanson [1], but it
looks to me that the time difference now comes from the cvs client (fp),
not from the cvs server (which was the case with Chris Hanson's report).

We've worked around this problem in GNUN, but I've decided to report it
anyway, since other users and services may suffer from it.  (For
example, all mail that flows through fencepost now is likely to have
incorrect time headers, which may happen to be a subtle problem for an
administrator who tries to diagnose a mail delaying problem using those
headers.)


[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers/2004-06/msg00273.html