I always thought that changing time_t to a 64 bit number would have been a good thing to do at the same time that glibc2 was released. You pretty much had to recompile everything anyway! I thought it would be kind of cool to say in the leadup to 2000 that your system could handle dates up to the year 4 billion AD (roughly).

Does anyone know a good reason why this shouldn't have been done?

Richard.