Updates:
Status: Fixed
Comment #3 on issue 169 by dorma...@rydia.net: probably incorrect treatment
of negative expiration time
http://code.google.com/p/memcached/issues/detail?id=169
Fixed for 1.4.7.
I basically settled on what ends up being the same workaround as the second
poster.
Originally I tried to process negative times in realtime(), but that added
an extra branch which is impossible to hit with the binary protocol. So
instead the ascii update handler internally flips negative exptimes to
REALTIME_MAXDELTA + 1
Closing bug.