"Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI)" <olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov> writes:

Of course it's possibly to simply... typedef long long raw_year_type; ...and use the defined type for year-holding variables to avoid problems with really big tm_year values.

These suggestions don't work in general. First, "long long" is not required by either C89 or K&R, and many older platforms don't have it. Second, C99 does not require "long long" to be wider than "int", and using "long long" doesn't solve overflow problems on those (admittedly rare) hosts where int == long == long long. The first point is probably more important as a practical matter, but as the code does attempt to be portable to all standard environments the second point is still of some concern. Overall, the proposed patch isn't all that bad in the code-complexity department. The overflow fixes themselves adds only 9 lines total to strftime.c and tzfile.h. (The proposed patch also includes 8 lines of %Y, %C, and %y commentary that is independent of the overflow fixes, but this can be omitted if you like.)