[info] [IRR] The end of time for Unix

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Marc Kupper <marc.kupper at gmail.com> -----

From: Marc Kupper <marc.kupper at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 11:55:10 -0700
To: 'Dan O'Neill' <dano at northpb.com>, 'tbtf-irregulars' <irregulars at tb.tf>
Subject: RE: [IRR] The end of time for Unix
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11

Dan O'Neill wrote:
> I thought this was clever...  I'm watching for it and have asked for a
reminder.
> http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-004287236-3

It's something I've been long aware of and years ago changed my own time
libraries to use unsigned numbers.  1/19/2038 03:14:07 GMT is 0x7fffffff
and the switch to unsigned bought another 68 years to 2/07/2106 06:28:15.

The question then becomes - what will break if I changed time_t to be a
64-bit value as I know there are some old saved-to-disk data structures
that assume 32-bits for the time_t. The good news is I'm no longer
maintaining the systems that stored values like this and I suspect they
will get replaced before the year 2106. They survived Y2K without a hitch,
I know the code will survive 2038, 2100 which is not a leap year, and
will fail in 2106 by reverting displayed times to 1/1/1970.

Marc
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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