On time64 and Large File Support

Paul Eggert eggert@cs.ucla.edu
Fri Mar 3 05:50:41 GMT 2023


On 3/2/23 19:30, Wookey wrote:
> Gnulib automatically changing the ABI for packages that use it is
> deeply unhelpful and is going to cause significant breakage and
> hassle.

This change to Gnulib was reverted in December[1] and that propagated 
into bleeding-edge GnuTLS last month[2]. So if I understand things 
correctly the next GnuTLS release will go back to the old way of doing 
things, which will tempt the 32-bit time_t rearguard to fall back into 
"Let's not worry about 2038" mode.

However this is just one package. We'll likely see similar issues with 
other packages, independently of whether they use Gnulib, and 
independently of whether the built packages are not supposed to be used 
after the year 2038.

So this incident is a warning siren for the 32-bit time_t community. 
It's no time to relax.

[1]: 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=7c7c8a519f3892f6f5b30a1c6b22796ab314a45c
[2]: 
https://gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls/-/commit/9622d7201e1d73d217c18802e1d435ba3404adb3



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