This is a reporter paraphrase of the Debian wiki page, which says: "time_t appears all over the place. 6,429 of Debian's 35,960 packages have time_t in the source. Packages which expose structs in their ABI which contain time_t will change their ABI and all such libraries need to migrate together, as is the case for any library ABI change."

A couple significant things I found much clearer in the wiki page than in the article:

* "For everything" means "on armel, armhf, hppa, m68k, powerpc and sh4 but not i386". I guess they've decided i386 doesn't have much of a future and its primary utility is running existing binaries (including dynamically-linked ones), so they don't want to break compatibility.

* "the move will be made after the release of Debian 13 'Trixie'" means "this change is included in Trixie".