to be Y2K safe.

results in a bogus datetime value under AlphaLinux.  (Note that
the link to submit a port-specific bug on your website is broken)

-Test Case:
----------
testdb=> create table dttest (dt datetime);
testdb=> insert into dttest values ('now');

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Solution:
---------
The basic problem is the typedefs of AbsoluteTime and RelativeTime,
which are both 'int32'.  These types appear to be used synonymously
with the 'time_t' type, which on AlphaLinux is typedef'd as a 'long
int', which is 64-bits (not 32).  The solution included here fixes
the datetime type (it now passes the regression test), but does not
pass the absolute and relative time regression tests.  Presumably, a
more thorough investigation of how these types are used is warranted.
The included patch is from the v6.3.2 source, but can be applied to
the v6.4.2 source.  Please note that there is also a RedHat-specific
patch distributed with the PostgreSQL source package from RedHat
that was applied first.

Rich Edwards

From: Tatsuo Ishii <t-ishii@sra.co.jp>

Ok. I made patches replacing all of "#if FALSE" or "#if 0" to "#ifdef
NOT_USED" for current. I have tested these patches in that the
postgres binaries are identical.

Allow varchar() to only store needed bytes.  Remove PALLOC,PALLOCTYPE,PFREE.  Clean up use of VARDATA.

Another PGINDENT run that changes variable indenting and case label indenting.  Also static variable indenting.

Fix pgproc names over 15 chars in output.  Add strNcpy() function.  remove some (void) casts that are unnecessary.

Use standard decoder for isreltime().

the last week on Hackers...(A coulpe of clippings of the final
verdict are included below + the diff).

From: Wayde Nie <niew@phoenix.cis.mcmaster.ca>

Subject: [HACKERS] More date time functions

Here are some additional patches mostly related to the date and time
data types. It includes some type conversion routines to move between
the different date types and some other date manipulation routines such
as date_part(units,datetime).

I noticed Edmund Mergl et al's neat trick for getting function overloading
for builtin functions, so started to use that for the date and time stuff.
Later, if someone figures out how to get function overloading directly
for internal C code, then we can move to that technique.

These patches include documentation updates (don't faint!) for the built-in
man page. Doesn't yet include mention of timestamp, since I don't know
much about it and since it may change a bit to become a _real_ ANSI timestamp
which would include parser support for the declaration syntax (what do you
think, Dan?).

The patches were developed on the 970330 release, but have been rebuilt
off of the 970402 release. The first patch below is to get libpq to compile,
on my Linux box, but is not related to the rest of the patches and you can
choose not to apply that one at this time. Thanks in advance, scrappy!