Proposed CHOST change for the 64bit time_t transition

[Andreas K. Huettel]

> One possible improvement would be to append "t32" if you want 32-bit 
> time_t, instead of appending "t64" for 64-bit time_t. 

I hope you aren't earnestly proposing this worst of both worlds idea 
(let's change CHOST for any system with no ABI change).

> I felt the same way about the 64-bit off_t back in the 1990s. It was 
> obvious to me even at the time that we would have been significantly 
> better off making off_t 64-bit, while keeping 32-bit off_t in the ABI 
> for backward compatibility; this is what NetBSD did with time_t in 2012. 
> Although I realize others felt differently, I never fully understood 
> their concerns.
> 
> And here I am, three decades later, still having to make changes[1] to 
> Autoconf's AC_SYS_LARGEFILE macro to continue to support that 
> 30-year-old off_t mistake, and now with 64-bit time_t interacting with 
> 64-off_t in non-orthogonal ways.

Well, at least time64 implies largefile, so that will get sorted as side
effect.


-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@gentoo.org
Gentoo Linux developer 
(council, comrel, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Dilfridge
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