[TYPO3-v4] Daterange in TCA

[Jigal van Hemert]

Thomas "Thasmo" Deinhamer wrote:
> in the TCA of many tables/extensions I can find this:
> 
> "'upper' => mktime(3, 14, 7, 1, 19, 2038),"
> 
> I googled it and it seems this was a limitation/bug in PHP 4.2.3
> on Windows: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=19414

The PHP manual [1] says:
"The valid range of a timestamp is typically from Fri, 13 Dec 1901 
20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. (These are the dates that 
correspond to the minimum and maximum values for a 32-bit signed 
integer). However, before PHP 5.1.0 this range was limited from 
01-01-1970 to 19-01-2038 on some systems (e.g. Windows). "

As long as we continue to use an integer together with PHPs date and 
time functions and as long as this format isn't changed to a 64-bit 
signed integer the upper limit will be January 19th, 2038.

The bug you refer to crached PHP on Windows when trying to make 
timestamp beyond that date.

There was for a period a limitation to the lower limit. A few years ago 
the authors of a standard C-library which is normally used for handling 
time and date functions decided to follow the definition of a UNIX 
timestamp strictly. The definition said that the timestamp of any moment 
before January 1st, 1970 is undefined; so they returned some negative 
number. Before that update negative timestamps had always worked.
Some time later PHP supported negative timestamps again.

Since PHP 5.2.0 there is a DateTime class which stores timestamps in a 
64-bit format, however MySQLs INT format is a 32-bit number. So we'd 
have to change all timestamp fields in tables to a BIGINT and force 
extensions to do the same. Seems like a real challenge...


[1] http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
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msn: jigal at xs4all.nl
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