Re: On time64 and Large File Support

[Florian Weimer]

* Andreas Schwab via Libc-alpha:

> On Mär 02 2023, Paul Eggert wrote:
>
>> Another thing that's different is that when off_t grew in the 1990s,
>> people said they needed a wider off_t RIGHT NOW, because programs wouldn't
>> work on large inputs otherwise.
>
> That is only true for rather few selected programs.

It depends on the system configuration.  For some file systems, inode
numbers outside the 32-bit range can be quite common.  This impacts
32-bit applications even if they never use ino_t because functions such
as fstat and readdir cannot know that these fields are unused.

We've been working around this for our 32-bit builders with special file
system configuration because like many, we do not build everything with
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64.

Thanks,
Florian