files with negative timestamps

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 04 Oct 2011, yancm%SDF.ORG@localhost wrote:
> I had been updating via cvs for 2-3 weeks and apparently every 
> file updated to my source tree during that time had a timestamp 
> c. 1945 or earlier.

Do we know what caused that?

> For whatever reason the build utilities and scripts just 
> silently failed on most if not all files prior to 1950 (?) 
> timestamp...

Any time earlier than 1970 appears as a negative number in the 
underlying time_t representation, and it's not really surprising 
that make(1) is confused by that, but it might be easily fixable.

--apb (Alan Barrett)