draft of ldm-users announcement (fwd)

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Robb Kambic                                Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer III                      Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research
address@hidden             WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 17:13:56 -0700
From: Russ Rew <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Subject: draft of ldm-users announcement

Below is a draft of the announcement to be set to ldm-users and
idd-relays mailing lists.  It seems too long to me, so I'd appreciate
suggestions to shorten it or make it sound better.  Also, who do you
think this should come from:  Me, Robb, support, or ??

Hi,

Thanks to Albion Taylor for being the first to point out a Y2K bug in
pqact from the current LDM (version 5.0.8) and all earlier versions.
The symptom of the bug is that pqact.conf action entries that make use
of two-digit year substitution patterns such as (\1:yy) or (\2:yy) will
substitute the string "10" instead of the string "00" for products
whose WMO header indicates a date in January or later.

For example, the pqact.conf entry

WMO     ^S[AP][AC-Z][A-Z].* .... ([0-3][0-9])
        FILE    data/obs/surface/hrly/(\1:yy)(\1:mm)\1.hrly

when presented with a matching product with a month component of 01
would append the product to a file with a name such as "100101.hrly"
instead of the expected "000101.hrly".

A fix for the bug is to change line 643 in the source file
ldm-5.0.8/src/pqact/palt.c:

643c643
<               (void) sprintf(ostring,"%d",year);
---
>               (void) sprintf(ostring,"%02d", year % 100);

and then rebuild pqact and reinstall it.  We installed and tested this
fix, and we're confident that it fixes the bug.

To make it easier to install this bug fix, we have built new versions
of pqact for all the common platforms for which we make binary
distributions.  You can just FTP the appropriate version of pqact for
your platform and install it in /usr/local/ldm/bin/pqact or wherever
you have pqact installed.  Below is a list of the available pqact
binaries.  Versions built for an earlier version of a platform, for
example sunos_5.6-sparc, will generally work on later versions of the
same platform such as sunos_5.7-sparc.  [Robb, please let me know
which of these we will have pqact binaries for].

  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/aix_4.2-rs6000/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/aix_4.3-rs6000/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/bsdos_3.0-i386/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/bsdos_4.0-i386/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/hpux_10.20-hp9000/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/hpux_11.00-hp9000/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/hpux_9.05-hp9000/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/irix64_6.2-mips/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/irix64_6.5-mips/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/irix_5.3-mips/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/irix_6.2-mips/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/irix_6.5-mips/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/linux_2.0-i586/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/linux_2.0-i686/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/linux_2.2-i686/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/linux_2.2.5-i686/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/osf1_4.0-alpha/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/sunos_4.1-sparc/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/sunos_5.5-sparc/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/sunos_5.6-i86pc/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/sunos_5.6-sparc/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/sunos_5.7-i86pc/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/sunos_5.7-sparc/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/ultrix_4.4-vax/pqact
  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary/ultrix_4.5-risc/pqact

If you have a platform for which none of these binaries is
appropriate, you will have to build a new version of pqact from
source after making the one-line change above.  We will be happy to
assist with this and give top priority to any questions about this
sent to "address@hidden".

Sorry for the inconvenience and the late notice on this bug, but it
slipped by our testing.