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The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t
In the Overview of cross-architecture portability problems, I have dedicated a section to the problems resulting from use of 32-bit time_t type. This design decision, still affecting Gentoo systems…
This design decision, still affecting Gentoo systems using glibc, means that 32-bit applications will suddenly start failing in horrible ways in 2038: they will be getting-1 error instead of the current time, they won’t be able to stat() files. Particularly, there is a fair number of prebuilt software that have no sources available, and it may continue working correctly against system libs, provided it does not call into any API using time_t. I would like to thank the following people for proof-reading and suggestions, and for their overall work towards time64 support in Gentoo: Arsen Arsenović, Andreas K. Hüttel, Sam James and Alexander Monakov.
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