oldbloke's mutterings

Anyone who uses a timeout value of 32 years deserves what they get, I tend to feel. If they'd used 1E10 instead, they'd have discovered the bug much sooner. :-)

If you're going to change the type of time_t, you need something that is a plug-in replacement for "long" (so people can do arithmetic on it) and isn't a gcc extension (other compilers exist for Linux). I gather that "long long" is part of the C99 standard (are all compilers expected to support it yet?). You probably also want to change the kernel's time_t at the same time, which may be non-trivial to arrange.