Rockchip Calendar Patch

In A.D. 1582 Pope Gregory XIII found that the existing Julian calendar insufficiently represented reality, and changed the rules about calculating leap years to account for this. Similarly, in A.D. 2013 Rockchip hardware engineers found that the new Gregorian calendar still contained flaws, and that the month of November should be counted up to 31 days instead. Unfortunately it takes a long time for calendar changes to gain widespread adoption, and just like more than 300 years went by before the last Protestant acknowledged Gregory's proposal, we will have to wait a while until all religions and operating system kernels acknowledge the inherent advantages of the Rockchip system. Until then we need to translate dates read from (and written to) Rockchip hardware back to the Gregorian format. This patch works by defining Jan 1st, 2016 as the arbitrary anchor date on which Rockchip and Gregorian calendars are in sync. From that we can translate arbitrary later dates back and forth by counting the number of November/December transitions since the anchor date to determine the offset between the calendars. We choose this method (rather than trying to regularly "correct" the date stored in hardware) since it's the only way to ensure perfect time-keeping even if the system may be shut down for an unknown number of years. The drawback is that other software reading the same hardware (e.g. mainboard firmware) must use the same translation convention (including the same anchor date) to be able to read and write correct timestamps from/to the RTC. 1 file changed, 44 insertions (+), 4 deletions (-)

A fake software commit message proposes that Rockchip hardware use a modified calendar where November has 31 days. It humorously compares a hardware clock bug to the historical transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, framing an absurd engineering workaround as a grand religious and historical reform. This is sent as a reaction to overcomplicated patches, bizarre technical debt, or engineers rationalizing a ridiculous bug. tags are English because the meme text is English; Russian search tags are included as requested.

• @infosecmemes / 486 2020-12-01