REBOL Technologies

XP Fixes REBOL/IOS Red Icons

Carl Sassenrath, CTO
REBOL Technologies
6-Apr-2005 18:13 GMT
Article #0149
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Last weekend we switched to daylight savings time (summer hours) here. But, the REBOL/IOS icons on most of our Microsoft systems did not go red. Has Microsoft finally fixed their nasty file date/time-shift bug? In the latest XP versions, it appears so.

The red icons problem is described in the Red Icons note found in our IOS documentation area. The problem occurs for this reason: when Microsoft Win32 switches to or from daylight savings time, they modify the timestamps for all files on your hard drive! (At the API level that is, not actually in the low level directory structure.) Of course, this problem does not occur on Linux, Unix, or any other operating systems, only on Windows.

For programs like IOS (and many other archive-related programs), the MS time change makes it appear that the files have been modified. IOS notices that and flags all the files as changed. They turn red to signal that change to the user.

Over the last year, we've updated most of our MS systems to XP and in fact most are running the latest service pack (SP2). On those systems, the red icon problem goes away.

So, we believe Microsoft has fixed the problem. Have you also found this to be true on your system? Send us feedback if you have any other information on this subject. Thanks.

Additional Note:

This is interesting: CVS, the source file management program, shows the files as modified on XP. If I had to guess, I would say that CVS was compensating for the Microsoft file date bug. Now that the bug is fixed, the compensating code breaks their date comparison. But, that's just my guess.

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