Debian developers have announced a plan to migrate all packages to use the 64-bit time_t type in the distribution's ports for 32-bit architectures. These changes will be included in Debian 13 'Trixie', which will fully address the Year 2038 problem.
Currently, the 64-bit time_t type is already utilized in Debian ports for the x32, riscv32, arc, and loong32 32-bit architectures, but for the i386, armel, armhf, mipsel, hppa, powerpc, m68k, and sh4 architectures, the 32-bit time_t type continues to be used, which cannot handle time after January 19, 2038 due to the overflow of the second counter since January 1, 1970. Of the 35,960 packages provided in Debian, the time_t type appears in 6,429 and affects more than 1,200 libraries.
The change of type will lead to ABI breakage and the need to rename the affected libraries, marking the largest ABI update in the project's history. About 500 libraries were uploaded to the experimental branch of Debian last Monday, and the rest are planned to be migrated to the 64-bit time_t type and uploaded this weekend. Once all issues identified after the migration are resolved in the experimental branch, new versions of libraries with 'abi=time64' will be uploaded to the unstable repository.
Source: opennet.ru
