Re: Y2038 - best way forward in Debian?
On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 10:56:47AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
>
> The thing that we have to remember is that an operating system is a
> platform for running software. This problem is rather thorny, because:
>
> 1) Some software is provided in only binary form and cannot be
> recompiled
>
> 2) Some software can be recompiled but makes assumptions about the size
> of variables, may use int instead of time_t, and other assorted
> messiness
Cleanest would be to run such legacy programs inside some virtualization
that also provides a virtual time long before 2038, using the last
Debian release with the old architecture.
> 3) Some software is going to break now, due to forward-looking time
> calculations, and for others, it may be fine (or nearly so) even past
> 2038 due to timekeeping being only ancillary to its purpose. For
> instance, I have some old games that are binary-only and really don't
> care what time it is.
>...
How confident are you that they work fine with negative time_t values?
Functions like time(2) return (time_t)-1 on error.
> John
cu
Adrian
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