Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/992120/

Michał Górny describes
the challenges involved in transitioning Gentoo to year-2038-safe time
representations:

There is a general agreement that the way forward is to change
time_t to a 64-bit type. Musl has already switched to that, glibc
supports it as an option. A number of other distributions such as
Debian have taken the leap and switched. Unfortunately,
source-based distributions such as Gentoo don’t have it that
easy. So we are still debating the issue and experimenting, trying
to figure out a maximally safe upgrade path for our users.

Unfortunately, that’s nowhere near trivial. Above all, we are
talking about a breaking ABI change.