On Sun, Sep 27, 1998 at 02:55:08PM +0200, Wojciech Zabolotny wrote: > Hi > There was a lot of noise about the y2k problem in old COBOL and M$ > applications, but what about the "Y2K+38 disaster" in the POSIX world? > I was pretty sure that the new libc6 library implements 64 bit time_t, > but just yesterday, during the testing of my new application I've stated, > that when I entered (just by mistake) the year 2100 instead of 2010, it > got completely crazy :-(. Hmm how crazy? considering that time_t is unsinged, when it overflows it should become -1 then count backwards....could apear very bizzar :) > Are there any plans to implement the 64 bit time_t in glibc? > I'm afraid, that it will be a big revolution, because AFAIK time_t > is used to store the information on disk by some filesystems (i don't > know what about the tar archives and so on)... Well I dunno about plans but here is how I see it... changing time_t to a 64 bit integer will likely break some things.. it will break any comercial apps which depend on it and havn't been fixed yet.. it would break binary compatibility in appss which need it with other linuxs This does need to be done eventually...but.. we have about 40 years to do it. Unix itself is only about 29 years old... we have much more tim eto consider it than the Y2K people. I DO however think we need to learn the lesson of Y2K and fix this within the next few years, but we have a luxory that the Y2K people don't, namely we have ime to discuss the ramifications, study them and then impliment the changes. > Well, I'm not sure if I'll be still alive in 2038, but I hope that > the Debian 80.45.1 will... :-). Well thats a good point but... we shouldn't forget that very soon we will all be running on SParcStation 10s running a MicroKernel based OS...oh wait... hmm SparcStation 10s are a bi told...maybe Mr Tannenbaum would like to revise that estimate he made a few years back... -Steve -- /* -- Stephen Carpenter <sjc@delphi.com> --- <sjc@debian.org>------------ */ E-mail "Bumper Stickers": "A FREE America or a Drug-Free America: You can't have both!" "honk if you Love Linux"
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