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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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The perils of transition to 64-bit time_t (blogs.gentoo.org)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I'm not familiar with the specific install/upgrade process on Gentoo so maybe I'm missing something, but what's wrong with forcing new installations to use time64 and then forcing existing installs to do some kind of offline migration from a live disk a decade or so down the line? I feel like it's probably somewhat uncommon for an installation of any distro to be used continuously for that amount of time (at least in a desktop context), and if anyone could be expected to be able to handle a manual intervention like this, it's long-time Gentoo users.

The bonus of this would be that it wouldn't be necessary to introduce a new lib* folder - the entire system either uses time64 or it doesn't. Maybe this still wouldn't be possible though depending on how source packages are distributed; like I said I dont really know Gentoo.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I imagine the "update from another system" path runs in troubles with more complex gentoo installs than just the base system. For a full update from the live disk it will have to include lots and lots of (often exotic) tools that might be used in the building process (document generators like doxgen, lexer, testing frameworks, several build systems and make-likes. programming languages...) in addition to being able to build against the already installed updates for packages while not accidental building against packages that are not updated yet.

Or you go the simpler way and only do a base update from the live-system...only update the base build system and package management of the gentoo system and afterwards boot in a "broken" system in which only the basics works and rebuild it from there.

For be both those options sound less desirable than what is suggested in the blog.