[Y2038] debian/armhf time64 build?

[Dominique MARTINET <dominique.martinet@atmark-techno.com>]

Hi,

Arnd did a superb recap in 2020, let me just link to it first in case anyone
needs a reminder:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2020/02/msg00024.html

tl;dr: glibc 2.34 added a -D_TIME_BITS=64 toggle, but afaiu we need to
rebuild (virtually) everything to use it as that breaks the ABI for
anything using time_t


As far as I'm aware, there haven't been any new public discussion since
that 2020 thread -- has there been any new attempt I missed?


(As a side note, it look like some tools like coreutils will be dealing
with it on their own, as they enabled the flag in gnulib themselves:
https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-gnulib@gnu.org/msg41057.html
(should be used from coreutils 9.0)

That can however only work for end programs that do not have any
dependency and cannot scale at distribution level...)



I won't bring anything very useful to the table here: I'd be happy to
give some limited time, but I won't have enough to do everything Arnd
tried and more than the lack of time don't have any resources to
actually do the work (e.g. disk space and cpu time)... And even if I
could it's not clear to me what way forward we'd actually prefer at this
point.

My naive opinion is that having a flag day and dealing with fallouts
might ultimately be the fastest way forward, but as there won't be any
safety check to detect incompatibility I don't think anyone will be
looking forward to the weird errors that will ensure for e.g. locally
compiled programs and whatsnot.

So that might be the first thing to think about again?
(... and I wish I had any idea there, but nothing practical to
suggest...)


Thanks!
-- 
Dominique