Re: [Y2038] Question regarding support of old time interfaces beyond y2038

Joseph Myers
2019-03-07T19:21:00Z

On Thu, 7 Mar 2019, Lukasz Majewski wrote:

> > 1) We should be clear that most of these will continue to be supported
> > as C library interfaces even if they are not system calls. Some of
> > them are obsolete enough and/or rarely used enough that we might not
> > bother (the older ways to set the system clock, for instance).
>
> The question here is about the decision if even the old time APIs shall
> be supported on 32 bit systems which are going to be Y2038 proof (like
> the 'stime').

The glibc API should support the same set of functions both with and
without _TIME_BITS=64.

I think it would be reasonable to obsolete the stime function in glibc
(meaning turn it into a compat symbol, not available for linking new
programs and not present at all for new architectures). But that's
orthogonal to supporting 64-bit times on 32-bit platforms in glibc. If
stime is obsoleted before (or in the same release as) that 64-bit time
support, no 64-bit version of stime is needed in glibc. If obsoleted in a
later release, glibc would need to get a 64-bit version (and both versions
would turn into compat symbols if the interface is obsoleted).

--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com