bug#64937: "who" reports funny dates

[Pádraig Brady]

On 30/07/2023 01:30, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 2023-07-29 12:44, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> > I tried a quick build with -D__WORDSIZE_TIME64_COMPAT32=1
> > which is what glibc uses to force the smaller time types.
> > However that didn't fix the issue, so I'll need to look a bit more,
> > and how to get only utmp access restricted to 32 bit types.
>
> I looked into that, and installed the attached patches into Gnulib and
> Coreutils respectively; these should work around the problem so I'll
> boldly close the bug report.
>
> These patches are quite a hack, though, and (obviously) stop working
> after the year 2038.
>
> What's Debian's and/or Fedora's plan for fixing <utmp.h>/<utmpx.h>'s
> Y2038 bugs? (Or is the idea to remove the <utmp.h></utmpx.h> API before
> 2038? :-)
>
> See:
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/925068/
>
> https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Y2038ProofnessDesign#utmp_types_and_APIs

Thanks Paul.

Yes I think the consensus is to switch away from the utmp API,
which was recently discussed at:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2023-06/msg00024.html

cheers,
Pádraig