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To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
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    from Garance A Drosihn at "Wed, 10 Mar 2004 18:00:07 +0000"
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 17:16:13 +1000
From: Stephen McKay <smckay@internode.on.net>
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cc: Stephen McKay <smckay@internode.on.net>
Subject: Re: HEADS UP! MAJOR change to FreeBSD/sparc64 
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On Wednesday, 10th March 2004, Garance A Drosihn wrote:

>The long-threatened change for FreeBSD/sparc64 has now been
>committed.  This changes time_t to be a 64-bit quantity, the
>same as it is for the AMD64 and IA64 architectures.  People
>running FreeBSD/sparc64 *will* have to read the UPDATING.64BTT
>file for instructions on how to safely build and install this
>change.

The change to 64-bit time is essential, of course, but I don't understand
why it has to break backward compatibility.  Surely you just allocate a
bunch of new system call numbers (for the 64-bit variants) while keeping
the old ones (so 32-bit time calls still work) and bump the version
number of every library.  What else is going on?  (I don't have a Sparc
or I'd join your experiment.)

>This only affects freebsd-current, of course.  Later we'll have
>to decide the best upgrade method for people who make the jump
>from RELENG_5_2 to the upcoming RELENG_5_3.

I'm thinking of the "later" where i386 is changed to 64-bit time_t.  If
that's not backward compatible, you'll get no takers.

Stephen.