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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: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday February 02 2018, @07:39PM (1 child)
While "most things" is likely true, lots of basic embedded code in OSes and such will likely still be around.
No offense intended, but this was precisely the attitude that created the Y2K "bug," which ended up costing hundreds of billions of dollars as old programmers expert in dead computer languages were pulled out of retirement to fix things... things that no one expected to still be around a couple decades after the code was first written.
(Note: there are those who claim a lot of Y2K prep was unnecessary and that the potential critical failures were overestimated. One can probably argue that there was a bit of overkill beyond major critical systems. But clearly there still was a lot of minor old code that was still in use and would have needed patching eventually... even if it wouldn't have resulted in a catastrophic failure on January 1st, 2000.)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 03 2018, @02:00AM
The thing is we've been (slowly) working on the problem ever since before the 64 bit chips became common. Places where it is critical should already have been patched. And for places where it's not critical....up until last year I still had a MSWindows95 system running. It was annoying that I couldn't set the time, but it sure wasn't important.
And since it's still two decades off, there shouldn't be any need for more than normal updates to software. (Of course you can say that some applications won't update their software, but they won't be helped by this kind of thing anyway.)
I remember that people started talking about how to address the 2038 problem back in the 1990's. So anything critical that people are willing to fix should already be fixed, and for the rest we're going to be forced to depend on obsolescence. Just make sure that any new software or updates to old software handles it properly. And that should be basic routine, not anything special.
I.O.W. if there's a new update to curl, and *that* is the main feature, then I don't see the reason for it. It should be built into the next standard update, the next standard release, whatever.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.