Date::Manip::History man page on Kali

Man page or keyword search:  
man Server   9211 pages
apropos Keyword Search (all sections)
Output format
Kali logo
[printable version]

Date::Manip::History(3User Contributed Perl DocumentaDate::Manip::History(3pm)

NAME
       Date::Manip::History - Twenty years and still going strong

TWENTY YEARS
       I just realized (Dec 2015) that Date::Manip turned twenty years old
       earlier this year, so I wanted to write some thoughts I have about
       Date::Manip.

       The history of Date::Manip can be broken into several periods.

       Birth of Date::Manip (1995-1996)
	   1995 was the year I really started using perl to automate some of
	   my common tasks.  At the time, I was running programs using a
	   number of different batch systems that needed dates entered in a
	   variety of different formats.  It was frustrating to remember what
	   format for what batch system, so I wrote some wrappers which would
	   take a few common formats that I wanted to use and would turn those
	   dates into whatever format the batch system needed.

	   After a few different wrapper scripts (where I copied the date
	   handling code between the scripts), I gathered all of the date
	   routines into one package.

	   This was the birth of Date::Manip.

	   I kept it that way for about half a year.  By that time, I was
	   thoroughly in love with perl and wanted to contribute.

	   At the time, CPAN was just a fledgling site, but in October, I
	   released my first package.  It wasn't really a module at that
	   time... it was crudely put together and extremely limited use.
	   Even so, it got some very positive initial feedback which spurred
	   the early growth.

	   There were several private versions followed by 4 public releases
	   (4.0 through 4.3) during this period.

	   Soon, I had adopted many of the best practices of the day and
	   converted it to a full-blown module.

       Active development (1996-2001)
	   The next 5 years were extremely active.  Based on suggestions and
	   requests, functionality increased dramatically, and before long,
	   Date::Manip was considered the goto module for Date operations.

	   During this period, a number of other modules came along that did a
	   small subset of the functions of Date::Manip (most of them
	   significantly faster), but none had the scope of Date::Manip.

	   During this period, I recognized that the single biggest weakness
	   was the inability to correctly handle timezones and daylight saving
	   time.  Towards the end of this period (2000 I believe), I began a
	   project to rewrite Date::Manip, but I didn't not have the time
	   needed to really carry it out at that time.

	   Another weakness was that Date::Manip grew in a random way.	As
	   ideas and suggestions came, I added them.  There was little
	   planning or forethought involved, and that led to it not having a
	   consistent API.

	   1998 did see the addition of Recurrences.  Although not an
	   extremely widely used piece of functionality, I regard this as the
	   single most important contribution I have ever made.	 I developed
	   the notation for specifying recurring events, and no other notation
	   has ever come close to matching it's power and flexibility.

	   This period, starting with the first release in a full module form,
	   included 26 releases (from 5.00 to 5.40).

       Minimal maintenance (2001-2008)
	   During these years, I was able to devote time needed to maintain
	   the existing module, but not to do major development.

	   As a result, the rewrite project remained incomplete (and in fact,
	   it was barely started).

	   During this time, due to the fact that no other module could handle
	   timezones correctly, DateTime arrived in 2003.  It featured a nice
	   object-oriented interface, and handled timezones.

	   Over the next few years, it became the de facto standard for date
	   handling in perl.

	   This period included only 8 releases (5.42 to 5.54).

       Rewrite (2009-2010)
	   In 2009, I decided it was time to fix the timezone problems in
	   Date::Manip .  Some people might see this as a waste of time due to
	   the fact that DateTime existed, but I had several thoughts.

	   First, many people continued to use Date::Manip.  This was evident
	   by the number of emails I continued to receive.

	   Second, there were still things that Date::Manip did better than
	   DateTime including recurrences and parsing.

	   Third, I love my module, and didn't want to see it die.  I'll
	   continue to use it, even if nobody else does.

	   So, I set out to fix it.  It turned out to be a complete rewrite,
	   but in the end, version 6 was released with full timezone handling,
	   even better parsing, and quite a few other features.

	   Date::Manip was once again very much alive.

	   This period featured 13 releases (6.00 to 6.14) with an additional
	   2 maintenance releases of version 5.

       Active maintenance (2010-present)
	   Although primarily in maintenance mode (due to the fact that
	   Date::Manip does pretty much everything that it was designed to
	   do), active maintenance continues.  There is also some development
	   and a large number of significant improvements have been made in
	   this period.

	   I make regular releases to update the timezone information, fix
	   bugs, and add the occasional new features.

	   For the foreseeable future, Date::Manip will remain active, and
	   fully capable of handling any common date operation.

	   Since 6.14, there have been 36 releases to date (6.20 to 6.59)
	   which is averaging about 5 releases per year.

ONE OF THE OLDEST
       I was curious to see how many other modules are out there that have
       survived as long as Date::Manip.

       The first public release of Date::Manip (though it was not a module yet
       of course) was version 4.0 on 13-Aug-1995.  The first public release to
       CPAN was version 4.2 released on 23-Oct-1995.

       I got a list of all CPAN modules from the wayback machine for 2000 (the
       earliest version of the list that I could find).	 Then I checked each
       of these authors on backpan to see which of these authors had packages
       (.tar.gz or .tgz files) released prior to 23-Oct-1995.

       I found that at the time Date-Manip 4.2 was released there were

	  32 authors
	  70 packages

       There are currently (Aug 2017) over 190,000 modules by over 13,000
       authors.	 So Date::Manip got involved in CPAN very early.

       Next, I tried to determine which of those authors and packages are
       still active.  I'm not completely sure about some of the packages
       because frequently, those old packages have changed maintainers, been
       renamed, or been incorporated into other packages.  So the number of
       active packages is actually a lower limit.

       I found that:

	  13 authors are active today
	  21 of the packages are active today
	  7 of those packages are still maintained by the original author

       An active author is one who has released something in the past 3 years.
       An active module is one that has been updated in the past 3 years.

       I apologize if I have missed anyone.

       The 7 packages which are older than Date::Manip and are still actively
       maintained by their original author (though they may have been renamed)
       are:

	  ILYAZ	 MathPari     23-Jan-1995
	  ANDK	 Symdump      16-Aug-1995
	  PMQS	 Filter	      28-Aug-1995
	  GAAS	 libwww-perl  16-Sep-1995
	  LDS	 GD	      17-Sep-1995
	  MEWP	 sybperl      02-Oct-1995
	  TOMZO	 Quota	      10-Oct-1995

       Congratulations to those authors who have been with perl since the
       beginning.  I'm proud to be in their company!  And congratulations to
       ILYAZ for having the oldest module in CPAN!

       Again, if I have missed anyone, please let me know.

SEE ALSO
       Date::Manip	  - main module documentation

LICENSE
       This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR
       Sullivan Beck (sbeck@cpan.org)

perl v5.26.0			  2017-10-14	     Date::Manip::History(3pm)
[top]

List of man pages available for Kali

Copyright (c) for man pages and the logo by the respective OS vendor.

For those who want to learn more, the polarhome community provides shell access and support.

[legal] [privacy] [GNU] [policy] [cookies] [netiquette] [sponsors] [FAQ]
Tweet
Polarhome, production since 1999.
Member of Polarhome portal.
Based on Fawad Halim's script.
....................................................................
Vote for polarhome
Free Shell Accounts :: the biggest list on the net