bug in inets or erlang!

[Matthias Lang]

Peter Lund writes:
 > Yes, the important question here is if:
 > 
 >   erlang:universaltime_to_localtime({{1969,12,31},{23,59,59}}).
 > 
 > really should crash the code just because it is 1 sec too early? 
 > No-one seems to have any opinion about it!

Finite limits in time representations are a fact of life in popular
operating systems, so there's always going to be a value that's just
one incy-wincy-teeny-weeny second on the wrong side of the
limit. Erlang just happens to have chosen an 'interesting' limit.

I don't recall ever seeing a bignum time representation in Erlang,
though there's bound to be a LISP one.

 > I am running on R10B (5.4.8). How do you figure out which "R10B-NN" it is?

The only way I know of is to remember which file you downloaded. I
don't think the system keeps track of the patch level.

 > Regarding why inets made this call when I tried to surf to "/" on
 > my server I do not know. I hoped that some OTP person should fix
 > this. 

"some OTP person". I guess that's slightly better than being a piece
of "human capital". If you're lucky, someone might help you debug the
problem---there are still a few steps to making it easily reproduceable.

Matthias