Re: [PATCH 01/12] Ext4: Fix extended timestamp encoding and decoding

[Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 10:30:39PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> The other large missing piece is the system call implementation. I have
> posted a series earlier this year before my parental leave, and it's
> currently lacking review from libc folks, and blocked on me to update
> the series and post it again.

I assume that this also means there hasn't been much thought about
userspace support above libc?  i.e., how to take a 64-bit time64_t (or
changing the size of time_t) and translating that to a string using
some kind of version of ctime() and asctime(), and how to parse a
post-2038 date string and turning it into a 64-bit time_t on a 32-bit
platform?

The reason why I'm asking is because I'm thinking about how to add the
appropriate regression test support to e2fsprogs for 32-bit platforms.
I'm probably going to just skip the tests on architectures where
sizeof(time_t) == 4 for now, since with a 32-bit time_t adding support
for post-2038 in a e2fsprogs-specific way is (a) something I don't
have time for, and (b) probably a waste of time since presumably we
will either need to have a more general solution, or simply decide to
give up on 32-bit platforms by 2038....

Cheers,

   	       	     	    	      	 - Ted