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Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 17:25:07 +0200
From: lada@ws6303.gud.siemens.at (marino.ladavac@siemens.at)
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To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, dfed@run.net
Subject: Re: Year 2000 !
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> From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Sep 22 17:05:15 MET 1997
> Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 17:55:10 +0300
> From: Dmitri Fedorov <dfed@run.net>
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> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
> Subject: Year 2000 !
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> 
> Hello,
> could you,please,answer me how FreeBSD will be adopted to Year2000 ?
> 
> How will it be solved ? (I am interested in localtime(), ctime()
> and so on functions.)

Not at all.  The year 2000 never was a problem.  The year 2038 is another
matter, but I strongly suspect that we will not be using 32 bit machines
at that time any more (nor UNIX, but that is another, regrettable, matter).

If you wanted more technical detail, the UNIX systems deal in seconds after
Epoch (01. 01. 1970. 00:00:00) and store them as time_t, which is a long
int on FreeBSD and virtually all unices (some other systems store it as a
normalized double mantissa and have 53 instead of 31 bits of precision--this
is somewhat against C and POSIX standards which mandate integral type for
time_t).

Sometime in mid-January 2038 will the 32 bit time_t become negative; thus 
the above comment.

The other great time entity in C and POSIX is struct tm which has int
fields for day-of-month, month, and year.  This one is safe until at least
the year 34667--I don't expect to be there at that time.
> 
> Thanks,
> Dmitri Fedorov, RUNNet.
> 
> 
>