Re: Y2038 - best way forward in Debian?
On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 11:41:32PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> 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.
This feels like a waste of effort, then. The only reason why people want
to run i386 is "multiarch, because I have this old binary that won't go
away". For all other stuff, there's amd64. Especially since RHEL doesn't
even do i386 anymore these days, so ISVs will have to compile for amd64
if they want it to work on whatever their customers run.
In my opinion, there are really only two viable options:
- Throw away the i386 port, and tell people that we no longer support
it;
- Figure out a way for 32-bit binary-only programs to keep working when
they touch a time_t beyond 2038.
Everything else feels like a waste of effort.
--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
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