Re: recommending AC_SYS_YEAR2038_REQUIRED ?

[Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> > How about a middle ground between the two macros? A macro, say
> > AC_SYS_YEAR2038_UNLESS_OPT_OUT (*), that
> >    - like AC_SYS_YEAR2038, has the option --disable-year2038,
> >    - like AC_SYS_YEAR2038_REQUIRED, fails if a large 'time_t' is
> >      unavailable and --disable-year2038 was not specified.
> 
> Even simpler, let's have just one new macro instead of two. I.e., let's 
> change Autoconf to remove AC_SYS_YEAR2038_REQUIRED and to define instead 
> a macro AC_SYS_YEAR2038_OPT_OUT that acts like AC_SYS_YEAR2038 except it 
> errors out if wide time_t and --disable-year2038 are both missing.
> 
> Then let's propagate this change into Gnulib, and rename Gnulib's 
> year2030-required module to year2038-opt-out.

I like this. Thanks.

And if the package would very much like to assume a wide time_t and
therefore has some test suite failures if --disable-year2038 was specified,
so be it. It's better to be able to build a package at all, with some
test suite failures, than not being able to build it at all.

> Similarly for AC_SYS_LARGEFILE_REQUIRED.

For the sake of symmetry between the two, that makes sense.

Bruno