On Friday 09 July 2010, Paul Howarth wrote:
After much experimentation bisecting the changes I had made, I discovered that a typo in the changelog entry was the culprit: I had set the year to 2100 instead of 2010. So it would appear that somewhere in the mock/yum/rpm stack there may be a year 2038 problem waiting to bite us (though I suspect there may not be too many 32-bit builds happening by then).
rpm(build?) 4.8.1 on my F-13 x86_64 box seems to overflow >= 2107 or something changelog timestamps so that they end up back in time starting from 1970.
Seriously though, it would be nice to have better diagnostics for this and perhaps an rpmlint check for changelog entries in the future?
Done in rpmlint upstream, will most likely be in 1.1. http://rpmlint.zarb.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/changeset/1827