Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/607/

'...(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?

But that's not a solution, it's just postponing the problem!!1!one

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.

Typical, kicking the can down the road instead of actually fixing the problem. And what happens 292 billion years from now when we all go through this again, huh?

Some Debian installs are used for 10+ years, so makes a lot of sense to do it now.

Finally learning some lessons!

The century date problem as it was known before Y2K was first described in the 1950s but people assumed it would be a moot point long before it was a problem.

When some of those mainframes were still in use in the 70s it was brought up again but nothing was done because it was assumed that it would be a moot point long before it was a problem.

When some of those mainframes or software were still in use (banks, oil companies, the IRS, etc) in the 90s it was finally seen a as a problem and cost billions of dollars to fix.

Then it happened again in 2020 because it turns out that the fix was to kick the can down the road again.

And what will we do when we get to December 4th, 292,277,026,596 AD, at 20:10:55 UTC?????

And dorks like to say smart watches don’t need 64 bit.