Bug 927561

Summary:	Portage could sanity-check the system clock
Product:	Portage Development	Reporter:	Tim Kritikos <oekbris>
Component:	Core - Interface (emerge)	Assignee:	Portage team <dev-portage>
Status:	UNCONFIRMED ---
Severity:	minor	CC:	oekbris
Priority:	Normal
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Tim Kritikos 2024-03-23 00:17:42 UTC

I hadn't noticed that the RTC battery failed on one of my computers and it didn't have NTP.
While doing an update it got stuck building sys-apps/file where configure completed successfully and then make called configure again in a loop.

I reproduced it on another system with this:
date -s 01/01/2018
emerge sys-apps/file --oneshot

Comment 1 Sam James archtester

2024-03-23 05:30:36 UTC

This will happen with many things if your clock is broken. I don't think we can really do anything about this.

Comment 2 Tim Kritikos 2024-03-23 06:16:20 UTC

(In reply to Sam James from comment #1)
> This will happen with many things if your clock is broken. I don't think we
> can really do anything about this.

Fair enough but I think configure can check for sane clock, at least htop does and fails gracefully

Comment 3 Sam James archtester

2024-03-23 06:36:02 UTC

It'd be hard to get such a check in every packages' autotools setup, but we could maybe have Portage do a quick sanity check?