History:
17 September 1998: initial.
Certain UAS products are considered to be mission-critical, and will need to be fully tested. These include: fmb (backup utility); ups/upd (product support utilities). Other products may be added to this list at a later time.
In fmb, all dates are printed by the system "date" utility, and date comparisons are done only on file timestamps by "find x -newer y..."
As to ups, upd, and upp; they internally track dates as ISO date strings, (of the format "yyyy-mm-dd hh.mm.ss GMT") which are certainly valid until the "Year 10k" issues surface, but they do use the system time conversion routines to generate those strings; so once again the local system libraries do come into play.
Given the seconds-since-1970 format of Unix's underlying date representation, we expect problems in that area to be quite rare at the year 2000 boundary, but rather expect problems later in the year at Feb 29th, when the leap year may be missed, or in 2036 when the time counter goes "negative" when treated as an unsigned 32-bit value. (The 2036 issue will probably be addressed as vendors move to 64 bit second counters).
It is also true, however, that as of September 1998, we have not yet run any Y2K, roll-the-clock-forward tests of fmb, or of ups, and that to test upd and upp thoroughly would involve setting up a product distribution server rolled ahead as well.