chrono VS time

The problem is that this effects higher languages too, because they often build on libc. And on some OSes, they don't have a choice, because the system call interface is unstable and/or undocumented).

For example in rust, multiple time libraries were found to be unsound if `std::env::set_env` was ever called from a multi-threaded program. See:

https://github.com/time-rs/time/issues/293 and https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/issues/499

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/27970

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/90308

> I think library authors should be more relentless and break compatibility every few years. We just need some conventions to not do so very often.

I indeed did this years ago---I'm the original author of Chrono [1]---and it wasn't well received [2] [3] [4]. To be fair, I knew it was a clear violation of semantic versioning but I didn't see any point of obeying that until we've reached 1.0 so I went ahead. People complained a lot and I had to yank the problematic release. By then I realized many enough people religiously expect semantic versioning (for good reasons though) and it's wiser to avoid useless conflict.

[1] https://github.com/chronotope/chrono

[2] https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/issues/146#issuecomment...

[3] https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/issues/156

[4] https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#...

On that note, it would also be good to configure cargo-deny so that a CI pipeline and any maintainer can easily audit the current dependency versions. Sometimes CVEs require a new major semver (looking at you, time 0.1.x and thus chrono 0.4.x), so it's not enough to rely on people installing the tool with semver-compatible updates. Automatically auditing dependencies is really important, and given how easy cargo-deny makes it, I don't think many projects have any excuse not to configure it.

The example has been randomly taken from the [Chrono][https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/blob/main/src/offset/utc.rs] crate.

libc isn't "just a wrapper". Is a massive legacy codebase filled with hacks, UBs and bugs: https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/issues/499

Would love to have people test this, you can leave feedback here: https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/issues/674.

Security issues? I'm looking at the open issues, but haven't noticed any that seem to be security related (no security related labels either). What am I missing here?

// To load RUST_LOG from .env file. dotenv().ok(); /* On Ubuntu 22.10, calling UtcOffset's offset methods causes IndeterminateOffset error!! See also https://github.com/time-rs/time/pull/297 ... */ // TO_DO: 11 is the current number of hours the Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) // is ahead of UTC. This value need to be worked out dynamically -- if it is at all // possible on Linux!! // let guard = init_app_logger(UtcOffset::from_hms(11, 0, 0).unwrap());

The problem is that this effects higher languages too, because they often build on libc. And on some OSes, they don't have a choice, because the system call interface is unstable and/or undocumented).

For example in rust, multiple time libraries were found to be unsound if `std::env::set_env` was ever called from a multi-threaded program. See:

https://github.com/time-rs/time/issues/293 and https://github.com/chronotope/chrono/issues/499

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/27970

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/90308

On that note, it would also be good to configure cargo-deny so that a CI pipeline and any maintainer can easily audit the current dependency versions. Sometimes CVEs require a new major semver (looking at you, time 0.1.x and thus chrono 0.4.x), so it's not enough to rely on people installing the tool with semver-compatible updates. Automatically auditing dependencies is really important, and given how easy cargo-deny makes it, I don't think many projects have any excuse not to configure it.

I've come to understand that correct support for leap seconds for time computations cannot be implemented in a reliable and globally consistent manner. Here is a GitHub discussion that touches on this.

Upgrade time to 0.3

I'm not fully aware of all the history but here's what I think happened: time 0.1 was originally a minimal wrapper around libc time functions, maintained by Alex Crichton. (I seem to remember it may have been part of the std library before 1.0, but I'm not sure about that part.) In August of 2016 it was declared to no longer be actively maintained, with the README stating bugs would still get fixed.

link to source code