How long is long enough?

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> > I disagree with Fred, because 292 years is way too short an era.
> 
> Will our code be around in 292 years?

How do we know it won't be?  There's no precedent on which to base an estimate.
We don't know how long software persists in a mature technogical civilization.

It seems wrong to me to invent a representation with that lind of limit when
struct timespec with 64-bit members is already standardized.

> How long would it take to make you happy?

I think I can live with 292 billion years. :-)

> Has anybody done studies of project lifetimes?  How many of them stay around 
> for 10 or 25 years without major changes?

I think it depends on what you call major changes. The most obvious candidates
for 25-year persistence I can think of are the C core of Emacs and GNUPLOT.
NTP comes close; based on the state I found in, I don't think it had undergone
*major* change since before 1995.

> Would it be better to have short eras so the code gets debugged?  1/2 :)

Thank you, I'd prefer not to be subject to rollover bugs.
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		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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