From: Tim Ferrell <s0nspark@...>
Date: 2008-01-05T00:24:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Time.gm(1969) chokes on Windows

Rob Biedenharn wrote:
> 
> You still haven't shown the exact format of the string that YAML
> doesn't parse the way you want.  I showed you that the format of the
> string influences whether YAML creates a Date or a Time object.  If
> you have a string that appears to be in the format of a time, but is
> outside the range of a Time object (on your platform), there may not
> be any way to get YAML to do what you want.  You can either get a
> better platform or preprocess the YAML to add the type specifier !str
> as Jamey suggests.  

Obviously the string in question is a timestamp - YAML/Syck handles 
plain pre-1970 dates just fine. So, assuming I have valid pre-1970 
timestamps to deal with, I am left with no choice BUT to work around 
Syck's (IMO shortsighted) choice of using Time.gm rather than DateTime, 
which I'm fairly certain was done for performance reasons... Still, it 
seems a rather bad choice given that it is not always portable.

My workaround was to drop Syck for this app and use a customized version 
of RbYAML, as mentioned in my previous post.

As for the "better platform" comment - believe me, it is not my choice 
to use Windows for this particular case but, given some constraints I am 
in no position to address right now, there is no other option.
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