From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Sep 25 15:44: 3 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from scientia.demon.co.uk (scientia.demon.co.uk [212.228.14.13]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B346C15377 for ; Sat, 25 Sep 1999 15:43:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ben@scientia.demon.co.uk) Received: from lithium.scientia.demon.co.uk ([192.168.0.3] ident=exim) by scientia.demon.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 3.032 #1) id 11UzfC-000Brx-00; Sat, 25 Sep 1999 22:47:26 +0100 Received: (from ben) by lithium.scientia.demon.co.uk (Exim 3.032 #1) id 11UzfC-0000PD-00; Sat, 25 Sep 1999 22:47:26 +0100 Date: Sat, 25 Sep 1999 22:47:26 +0100 From: Ben Smithurst To: Arash Farahmand Cc: Greg Lehey , "Jon O." , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Time and history Message-ID: <19990925224726.B1470@lithium.scientia.demon.co.uk> References: <19990925173053.F54407@freebie.lemis.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.6i In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Arash Farahmand wrote: > Unix time counter will reset sometime in the year 2037 (again, please > correct me if this is wrong). Although this is relatively far in the > future, People in 1963 were probably saying that about the year 2000, and look at the mess people have got into now. > is there any plan to modify the time counter on Unix machines to cope > with the next time bug? ;-) With any luck, we'll all be using 64-bit machines by then, and this won't be an issue, since time_t can be made a 64-bit value. I make 2^63 seconds to be about 288 billion years, which is almost certainly way beyond the lifetime of our Sun and/or Earth. I can't see Unix's time mechanism changing from secs since 00:00:00 1970-01-01, it would confuse too many people. time_t and friends could probably be made a 64-bit value even on 32-bit machines, but I don't know what this would do to performance. (How do 32-bit machines to 64-bit math anyway? I guess I should find out.) Incidentally, someone the other day mentioned in a newsgroup that when the seconds-since-1970 value hits 10 digits (this isn't very far away, only a couple of years I think), this might confuse some software which has expected 9 digit values (which has been the case since about 1973). I wouldn't be at all surprised if such software existed, it's no more or less stupid than storing two digit years. -- Ben Smithurst | PGP: 0x99392F7D ben@scientia.demon.co.uk | key available from keyservers and | ben+pgp@scientia.demon.co.uk To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message