> From: Helen Borrie <helebor@...>
> Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 01:17:13 +1000
>

...

> I'd bet that this happened while Inprise were FTP'ing files around their
> networks. FTP doesn't give you any choice - every file gets the system
> timestamp where and when it lands. Hence, because I'm transferring html
> files from today into yesterday, my live files are always "older" than
> those on my local disk...

I'd love to be able to duck out with the explanation that Helen
offered, but I cannot. The truth of the matter is that it's my error.
We had source and binary kits ready to go out on 23 June, but the
lawyers did not agree. In accord with our established custom, I used
"touch -t" to set the timestamp on all the files (and directories on
the Solaris kit, but touch doesn't work on directories on Windows) to
that date, and the time 6:00:00 AM, signifying version 6.0.

I simply failed to think of the special case of a file which came from
MicroSoft, and for which I should NOT touch the timestamp. (What can
I say, I'm a Unix kind of a guy: we don't need to ship a replacement
libc.so.* with a Solaris or Linux binary distribution of InterBase, so
I didn't think of such a problem.)

It also never occurred to me that the install might decide what to do
based on the timestamps on files, rather than the version information.
I know better now, and neither I nor any of the other InterBase
engineers is likely to make this mistake again. We won't touch
timestamps on MS files any more, and we'll also fix the setup.exe to
make its decisions based on the version information, not the
timestamp.

I zipped or tarred archives of the files, thus protecting the
timestamps which I had created. The Inprise executive involved in all
of this only ftp'ed the *.ZIP or *.tar.gz files to get them to the right
place for public availability, and neither he nor the FTP program
deserves any opprobium in this matter. Mea culpa. :-(

I'd like to thank all who have contributed to this thread for
explaining to us what went wrong, and to apologize to all who have
been inconvenienced (or worse) by the mistake.

--
Chris Jewell developer/sysadmin voice: 831-431-6531
cjewell@... InterBase Software fax: 831-431-6510