Re: recommending AC_SYS_YEAR2038_REQUIRED ?

[Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>]

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> As the person who invented AC_SYS_YEAR2038_REQUIRED and
> AC_SYS_LARGEFILE_REQUIRED, let me say that it was my intention that they
> would only be used in rare circumstances, where the inability to install
> the software on older ABIs is outweighed by some other strong
> requirement for time_t and/or off_t to be at least 64 bits.  I didn't
> have any specific use cases in mind but I was imagining something to do
> with library ABIs involving time_t, or network and/or storage formats
> explicitly specified to use 64-bit counts of seconds since the Unix
> epoch, or similar.

Thanks for the clarification.

Note that I'm perfectly fine with AC_SYS_LARGEFILE_REQUIRED being
documented, because
  - it makes perfect sense for packages that regularly deal with files
    larger than 2 GiB, such as video manipulation,
  - hardly any platform nowadays lacks a way to enforce large files in
    the API.

Bruno