Y2038

David Cuthbert dacut at kanga.org
Wed Nov 5 21:19:32 PST 2003


Matthew Dillon wrote:
    This has been discussed many times on the FreeBSD lists.  The FreeBSD
    folks would prefer to simply wait for all architectures to become 64 bits.
    e.g. for IA32 to die out.  I would prefer to make time_t a 64 bit 
    quantity.  But both 'solutions' have serious problems.  time_t is assumed
    to be a 'long' in a great deal of third party code.
Eh, I'd just say break 'em.  We'll patch them up in ports, if need be. 
On this front, DF would be providing a service by finding time_t 
portability bugs in third-party code.  See, enough spin will make any 
bug a feature :-).

The vast majority of breakage will require one-line patches (long -> 
time_t).

The hard part is if a program marshalls a time_t out to disk.  On this 
front, even properly-written programs may have issues with old data files.






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