The week (or so) in review

It's kind of weird for me to realize that I posted my "picking up the
ball" message only last Thursday.

Here's a quick review of what's been accomplished so far:

- 318 messages to the list!  That's 45% of the total list traffic for all
time (since May, 2001 or so).  Scary but good, as it shows there's
interest.  Amusingly, I was afraid that my message would generate very
little response.

- We have a SourceForge project, perl-date-time.  Rich Bowen set this up a
while ago but it's just now getting used.  Web and anonymous CVS on SF are
down, sadly, so no one but the committers can see what's in there.

- Wrangled some cats to work on this, including Rich Bowen, David Wheeler,
Flavio Glock, Jesse Vincent, and myself.  I just realized I hadn't yet
given David access to CVS.  Oops.  Just fixed that.

- Settled on 1-indexed numbers, with alternate 0-index numbers available
via a parallel set of _0 methods.

- Settled on Monday as first day of week (may want a parallel
day_of_week_sunday_is_first method though)

- Started discussions on some important things, including time zones, leap
seconds, and what the DateTime::Set API should be.

- For me personally, this has been a good week, since I've learned about
various calendars, leap seconds, time zones, ICal, RFC 2445, julian days
(and modified julian days), Rata Die, and a bunch of other subjects.

- I started a basic coding/documentation/packaging standards doc I need to
check in, but which can probably wait til we have more people working on
actual code for the project.

- Actually got some code in CVS (code speaks louder than words, I think
we'd all agree).  This includes:

DateTime.pm - based on Date::ICal.  Work on this achieve the following:

- added a bunch of methods to this for "parts of things" access (day of
week, day of year, and all that).

- cleaned up some of the existing internals

- added flexible error handling (warn & return undef, die, throw
exception, or call user defined callback).

- added language localization through the DateTime::Language modules.
Right now this just handles day & month names, and localized AM/PM
abbreviations.  This was taken from Graham Barr's TimeDate package.

- added strftime (which may move to a separate module, but it works)

- all new functionality does have at least some tests.

- cleaned up some of the existing test code

- made a quite long todo list ;)

Also in CVS is DateTime::Event::FourthofJuly, which Rich wrote, for those
who have trouble with remember that holiday ;)  Seriously, it's not
entirely silly, because you can easily grab a "fourth of july datetime"
object and ask what day it is and so on.  It'll also be useful as an
example for more complex event-implementing modules.



So all in all, I'm pretty happy with the work done so far, and hope we can
keep going, though obviously things will settle down to a less manic pace
over time.


-dave

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• The week (or so) in review by Dave Rolsky
• Re: The week (or so) in review by Joshua Hoblitt
• Re: The week (or so) in review by Dave Rolsky
• Re: The week (or so) in review by Joshua Hoblitt