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Note that for most systems this transition already happened with the transition to 64-bit architectures, in the 2000s. It's only 32-bit architectures to which the current transition applies. Debian couldn't have transitioned them 20 years ago, as kernel support for 64-bit time_t on a 32-bit architecture is fairly recent (Linux 5.6 in 2020).

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I remember OpenBSD working on this about 10 years ago.

Also, strictly speaking transitioning with the CPU architecture is not enough -- having kernel APIs and ABIs have 64-bit time_t is not the only place it needs to change. Notably, it has to change in the filesystem too. And at that point millions of people will have on-disk structures with 32bit timestamps, so it needs to transition in a somewhat back compatible way.

Except some communication protocols have a 32 bit timestamp baked into the format.

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