From: clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP

On 2025-10-28, Robert A. Brooks  wrote:
>
> [EVL]EVLJULIAN.B32
> X-4     RAB0249         Robert A. Brooks        17-Nov-2022
>          Fix for Jira DV-13/NetSuite 2057 -- "DECnet Phase IV"
>          NICE event date issue"
>
>          From a customer-sent mail message
>
>          "Events are time-stamped when they are generated with a
>          2-byte field holding the number of half julian days
>          since Jan-1 1977. The spec (Network Management 4.0.0,
>          page 170/171) implies that these 2 bytes should be treated
>          as a signed value (0 - 32767) which will overflow on
>          Nov 9th 2021. If the code treats it as unsigned, then we
>          are good for another 44 years."
>
>          The code in routine EVL$JULIAN appears to treat the
>          relevant word as unsigned, but there is an explicit
>          check such that any date after 1-Nov-2022 will return
>          an error.  Simply pushing the gating date check into
>          the future allows the date to be formatted and displayed
>          correctly.  For cuteness, I'm using my 100th birthday of
>          December 20, 2061 as the gating date.  Yeah, it's not
>          exactly 44 years past 10-Nov-2022, but hey, it's my call
>          to make.
>

Interesting thanks. You made your change after I had finished my probing,
but dates after the overflow date still worked for me at that time. My guess
is that I didn't try any dates after that hard cutoff date of 1-Nov-2022.

Also, thanks for showing the detailed change log entry above. It reminded
me of my thoughts at the time I discovered this that, unless they wanted
to go back in time, there was no reason for that field to be a signed value
instead of an unsigned value.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

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