Hi,

today I have been preparing an update to perl-Math-Pari and came across a very strange build failure whilst doing a local mock build on a Fedora 13 x86_64 host. My package built successfully on x86_64 but when I tried to build for i386, the build failed during %setup but without any diagnostics. The SRPM was installed but no attempt to install its build requirements was made. The root.log showed an exit status of 0 for all commands that had been run.

After much experimentation bisecting the changes I had made, I discovered that a typo in the changelog entry was the culprit: I had set the year to 2100 instead of 2010. So it would appear that somewhere in the mock/yum/rpm stack there may be a year 2038 problem waiting to bite us (though I suspect there may not be too many 32-bit builds happening by then).

Seriously though, it would be nice to have better diagnostics for this and perhaps an rpmlint check for changelog entries in the future?

Paul.