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Y2K38 bug? Debian switching to 64-bit time for everything
(www.theregister.com)
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/607/
If only we'd chosen 1944-12-02 08:45:52 as the Unix epoch, we could've combined two doomsday scenarios into one and added a really boring scene to that Roland Emmerich movie.
But that's not a solution, it's just postponing the problem!!1!one
"it's just postponing the problem!!1!one" The thing of including a "one" to make the irony of your exclamation abundantly clear is a delightful bit of internet-ese. I always find it funny when I see it
For me the giveaway was 2^64 being 1.8*10^19 years from now.
Thanks! I find it nicer than including "/s" at the end :)
True, but only if the latest theories on Big Crunch being back on the table don't hold up. Debian ought to not only push out 64 bit time, but place "now" right in the middle to cover any discoveries of an older universe. Hell, they ought to do that and make it 128 bit, to cover anything.
Exponentials can be profound when you grasp them for that fleeting second.
'...(potentially setting time back to 1900)...'
From my understanding, unless I'm mistaken, wouldn't the 32 bit time reset back to 1970 after the overflow/rollover?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Timestamps that use signed int will go back to 1901 (-2,147,483,647)
Oh shit, I missed that part, I always thought it was an unsigned int.. ๐คฆโโ๏ธ
Well today I learned ๐
you're wrong, but so was the article, so I guess that cancels out :D it's late 1901
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
That's just a really solid joke.
The actual transition happened ages ago - 2024 or so. A bunch of transitional packages in Testing and Sid had -t64 appended for a while.
Hmm, Debian and other long-term support distros are kind of in a tricky position with problems like these. On the one hand, they don't want to break things, so they'll often make changes like these relatively late. But on the other hand, someone might still run a current version of the distro in 2038, so they actually want to solve it as early as possible, too.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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