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curl is a text-based utility and library for transferring data identified by their URLs. It is now year-2038 safe even on 32-bit systems. Daniel Stenberg, the orginal hacker of curl, has overseen a year-2038 fix for 32-bit systems. Without specific modifications, 32-bit systems cannot handle dates beyond 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. After that date, the time counter flips over and starts over again at zero, which would be the beginning of the UNIX epoch known as 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970. Given the pervasiveness of 32-bit embedded systems and their long service lives, this is a serious problem and good (essential) to have fixed decades in advance. The OpenBSD project was the first major software project to take steps to avoid potential disaster from 32-bit time and awareness has since started to spread to other key software project such as curl.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @12:29PM
All things considered it also depends on what the application uses the date for. Most calls to time functions are to set short term timers (unless the rollover occurs exactly during the lifetime of that timer nothing happens), print a date to screen/a log etc. A rollover would not have any effect on these other than displaying the wrong date in the latter two cases. These kind of things are more an issue if you rely on earlier dates from a database/external timestamp to do tasks.