Re: On time64 and Large File Support

Paul Eggert <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lib.glibc.alpha,gmane.comp.sysutils.autoconf.general
Organization UCLA Computer Science Department
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 3/2/23 02:38, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> There is a huge difference between them: time_t has a flag day, off_t
> doesn't.

Absolutely right.

Another thing that's different is that when off_t grew in the 1990s, 
people said they needed a wider off_t RIGHT NOW, because programs 
wouldn't work on large inputs otherwise. The pressure to build with 
_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 was large enough that a working consensus was 
reached pretty quickly to build that way.

In contrast, people don't urgently need a wider time_t until 2038. So 
the "let's be organized about this and do things systematically" 
sentiment wins, and because other things take priority time_t conversion 
never gets done. (Or possibly the "either the platform or I will be dead 
by 2038 so let's do nothing" sentiment wins, which is another 
seemingly-good reason to do nothing....)
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.