Re: Accelerating Y2038 glibc fixes

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

* Wolfgang Denk:

> We have been trying for some time to help some of our customers to
> get patches into glibc to fix the remaining Y2038 issues.

> Is there anything we can do to accelerate this process?  As
> mentioned, we are willing to dedicate both man-power and/or money,
> if this helps.

One difficult trade-off is that for you, this is just one-time
enablement work, but the regular contributors will be stuck with the
code you add forever.  Especially since it touches 64-bit architectures
as well.

For me personally, the whole project is quite baffling.  I'm interested
in 32-bit changes only to support legacy binaries, and this is new work
targeting new binaries.  Particularly for i386, it *will* lead to ABI
fragmentation.  We can add dual ABI support for glibc, but for the rest
of the system, distributions will have to pick a default (probably with
their build flags selection), and they will make different choices.
Some distributions will focus on backwards compatibility with legacy
binaries, but others want to keep the i386 architecture alive for many
more years.  I really do not want to deal with the resulting confusion,
but it seems that I do not have any choice there.

Since I'm opposed to this entire project, I have largely refrained from
reviews, except for things that looked obviously wrong to me (e.g.,
things that definitely break compatibility with older kernels or
existing ABIs), but even for those cases, my feedback probably wasn't
very helpful.

Thanks,
Florian