Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:49:41 +0200 | Subject | Re: RFD: x32 ABI system call numbers | From | Geert Uytterhoeven <> |
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On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 21:18, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote: > On Wednesday 31 August 2011 09:48:35 Linus Torvalds wrote: >> On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote: >> > >> > Well, we could chicken out and just use unsigned int for time_t on new >> > 32 bit ABIs, which would buy us time until ~2106 before we need to >> > convert everything to 64 bit... >> >> You do realize that there are probably quite a lot of programs that >> depend on signed time_t because they really do care about dates before >> 1970? > > Yes, it already occurred to me after I had written the above that we > really want it to be signed, especially to allow a meaningful conversion > at least one-way between 32 and 64 bit time_t values.
If you care about dates before 1970, you're using time_t not to store the current time +/- some epsilon, for a "reasonable small epsilon", but to store real dates. That was never a good idea. During the early days of UNIX, when the 1970 base was chosen, lots of people born before 1902 were still alive...
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
-- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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