Warning for UX owners - date

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

This concerns only UX owners.  No other Alpha platform is affected.

If you are using the latest 6.1 Red Hat distribution then when startup
scripts detect that you are booting with milo they will add,
automatically, regardless of settings in /etc/sysconfig/clock, a flag
'-A' which forces ARC interpretation of a hardware supplied time.

That would be not so bad if for not the fact that 6.1 is using
/sbin/hwclock from 'util-linux' package and on UX an effect of this flag
with this program is to back off date by 20 years.  If you will give
'-S' instead, or if you will skip both '-A' and '-S', your date will be
fine.  So, if you do today a new installation on UX, or an upgrade to
6.1, you will end up in a year 1980.

Moreover, the maintainer of 'util-linux', Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl,
vehemently insists, for reasons which are hard for me to comprehend,
that this is THE correct behaviour so things are likely to stay that
way.  If you want to explain basic facts of life to Andries - be my
guest.  I tried and failed; but maybe, if more people will express an
opinion similar to mine that breaking an established and expected
behaviour of /sbin/clock is just a bug, he will be more receptive.

The simplest fix for the moment is to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.sysconfig and
comment out a statement which adds this uncalled for '-A'.  I filed bug
reports with Red Hat, together with patches to fix 'hwclock' and we will
see.  But I will be not surprised if other distributions would be
affected in the same way.

Once again, if your machine is not UX then things are cool.

  Michal