Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1999 14:43:27 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Peter Jeremy <peter.jeremy@auss2.alcatel.com.au>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Y2K, Y 2038? Message-ID: <199901052243.OAA97949@apollo.backplane.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
:> overly concerned :-).
:>
:> There was a very similar discussion some months ago regarding the
:> timestamp field in the inode (on -hackers from memory). I don't
:> think the discussion went anywhere fruitful.
:
:Part of that discussion was concerned with the fact that, correctly or
:incorrectly, people use negative time_t's. This would break that for
:a comparatively minor benefit.
It isn't so much that people use negative time_t's as it is people
comparing time_t's and assuming a *signed* result. If time_t is
unsigned, the result will be unsigned. This screws up relative
compares in a lot of legacy code.
Neither can time_t simply magically become 64 bits on systems where
it was 32 bits before - that would be a disaster. A lot of software
stores time_t in binary form in databases and such - for all sorts of
reasons. It would be a disaster an order of magnitude greater then
the mess that occured when 4.4 first started using 64 bit file offsets
and a lot of legacy software didn't compare because it manually extern'd
system functions rather then #include the correct header file.
I would prefer NOT making *two* hacks to the time system. We should
just move to 64 bit 'ltime_t' or something like that. It is not
a big deal. Then we'll have 30 years to translate the legacy time_t's
useage into the new ltime_t useage.
-Matt
:Greg
:--
:See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers
:finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key
:
:To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
:with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
:
Matthew Dillon Engineering, HiWay Technologies, Inc. & BEST Internet
Communications & God knows what else.
<dillon@backplane.com> (Please include original email in any response)
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199901052243.OAA97949>