SCO UNIX and Filepro 4.05

[Brian K. White]

On 8/19/20 11:31 PM, Jay R. Ashworth via Filepro-list wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "William J. McEachran via Filepro-list" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
>> To: "Filepro 2 List" <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
>> Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2020 10:10:27 AM
>> Subject: Re: SCO UNIX and Filepro 4.05
>> Long ago I wrote a cron job to increment PFCMARK each year.
>> I'm afraid that was 'good enough' for everyone whose filePro systems I was
>> managing.
> Yeah, but you can't really *do* that.
>
> PFCMARK is *baked into* any data you store with a 2-digit year.
>
> If you move PFCMARK, you *break* any data whose 2-digit year it moves
> across.  If you have to move it, you have to *sweep* all your files for 2
> digit years, and decide what to do with 1940 dates when 40 now means 2040.
>

THIS.
Insane. Do not do.

To change pfcmark, you have to purge all data from before the proposed 
new pfcmark before changing.

Today pfcmark is 50. You want to make it 99. Before changing, purge all 
data which is from, or even refers to, anything from before 00, then change.
I don't think that would necessarily be very easy. Simply deleting 
records isn't enough. You have to look at every date *field* in every 
record in every file to do something with every *reference* to any date.

It may actually not be less work than changing the fields to 4 digit years.

You could keep the old data, but in a separate copy of the system with 
it's own old pfcmark.
Copy the whole appl dir from today. Give it a new start script and 
change the screen & menu colors.
Then purge the old records and references from the original.
Don't allow any new work to occur in the archival copy.

Or you could force the customer to start over on a new copy of the 
system. No old records, just imported customer, vendor, gl, files and 
current values starting point for everything.

-- 
bkw