On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 10:56:47AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote: > > The thing that we have to remember is that an operating system is a > platform for running software. This problem is rather thorny, because: > > 1) Some software is provided in only binary form and cannot be > recompiled > > 2) Some software can be recompiled but makes assumptions about the size > of variables, may use int instead of time_t, and other assorted > messiness
Cleanest would be to run such legacy programs inside some virtualization that also provides a virtual time long before 2038, using the last Debian release with the old architecture. > 3) Some software is going to break now, due to forward-looking time > calculations, and for others, it may be fine (or nearly so) even past > 2038 due to timekeeping being only ancillary to its purpose. For > instance, I have some old games that are binary-only and really don't > care what time it is. >... How confident are you that they work fine with negative time_t values? Functions like time(2) return (time_t)-1 on error. > John cu Adrian
