Re: Debian and the millenium bug
> a 64 bit variable, it's good for another 4000 years.
Uhhh -- no. If it went from 32 bits to *33* bits, that would get us
4000 years. This gets us more like 16 billion billion years (american
billions - 16 x 10^18 is what I mean, but it's off the top of my head...)
> Don't you think you're overstating this just a bit? What about programs
> that store time_t's in ints? Or write them out to some kind of storage?
Well, NetBSD already has a 64 bit off_t... I think the way most
people expect the transition to happen is that *int* will become 64
bit, and things will just deal. Since lots of other things that
assume 32 bit ints now are already starting to break (ip addresses
won't fit any more, off_t's won't fit, pointers *never* fit on the
alpha...) I think that system code will be fine, and legacy code will
be the problem that it already is.
Note also that for most applications that can't be recompiled, being
really clever with the 32-bit ctime in the shared libc will cover a
fair number of sins... but I hope not to catch anyone actually doing
that :-)
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