Re: Y2038 - best way forward in Debian?

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

Hey John,

John Goarzen wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 04 2020, Steve McIntyre 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

Oh, absolutely. In that situation there's not a lot we can sensibly
do, modulo telling people to run such things in a time-shifted VM. I'm
more worried about making *our* software work in the future.

>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

Nod. I'm sure we'll find quite a bit of that, and need to file (and
maybe fix) those bugs. Hell, we're also likely to find some places
where we won't be able to sensibly fix things. But it's better to know
and document those places than not.

>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.

Yup.

>This option #1 sounds like a significant effort (because not only would
>we need two versions of libraries, but also of include files).  But it
>certainly passes the "correctness" test better than your option #2.

Sure. It comes down to how long we think we can / want to spend on
this. I'd *hope* that a lot of software *will* work correctly with a
rebootstrap, but of course we know it won't be 100%. I'm concerned
that we don't leave it too long to get on with fixing things - that
will continue to build an ever-growing corpus of broken systems that
people will need to deal with later.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
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