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Date::Manip::Problems(User Contributed Perl DocumentatDate::Manip::Problems(3)

NAME
       Date::Manip::Problems - problems and bugs

KNOWN PROBLEMS
       The following are not bugs in Date::Manip, but they may give some
       people problems.

       Memory leak
	   There is a known memory leak in perl related to named regexp
	   captures that directly affects Date::Manip . The leak is in all
	   versions of perl that I have tested starting at 5.10. I have
	   submitted a bug report (perlbug #78266). Until perl is fixed, if
	   you need to use Date::Manip in a persistent environment, you should
	   be aware of this.

	   Date::Manip 5.xx is not susceptible, so using it may be a feasible
	   workaround, but if you need accurate timezone handling, this isn't
	   possible.

	   The leak is fairly small. A crude estimate is 3 MB per 10,000 dates
	   parsed, so unless you're parsing hundreds of thousands, or millions
	   of dates, the leak probably won't be a problem. And if you're
	   parsing that many dates, the relatively slow Date::Manip may not be
	   the correct module for you to use anyway.

       Unable to determine Time Zone
	   Please refer to the Date::Manip::TZ documentation for a discussion
	   of this problem.

       Calculations appear to be off by an hour
	   Within days of releasing 6.00, I got the following report:

	      print DateCalc(ParseDate("2009/10/31"), "+1 day"), "\n";
	      print DateCalc(ParseDate("2009/11/01"), "+1 day"), "\n";
	      print DateCalc(ParseDate("2009/11/02"), "+1 day"), "\n";

	   produced:

	      2009110100:00:00
	      2009110123:00:00
	      2009110300:00:00

	   In other words, the second calculation appears to be off by one
	   hour.  In actuality, the result is correct. In the user's time
	   zone, daylight saving time ended on Nov 1, and since "+ 1 day" is
	   equivalent to "+ 24 hours", the results are correct. In
	   America/New_York time (which has the same result), the calculation
	   means that:

	      2009-11-01 00:00:00 EDT + 24 hours =
	      2009-11-01 23:00:00 EST

	   which is correct.

       Missing date formats
	   Due to the large number of date formats that Date::Manip CAN
	   process, people often assume that other formats that they want to
	   use should work as well, and when they don't, it comes as a
	   surprise.

	   With the much improved parsing of 6.00, many formats can be added
	   easily, though unless they are of general use, I'll probably
	   suggest that you use parse_format instead.

	   There is a class of formats that I will not add however.

	   I have frequently been asked to add formats such as "the 15th of
	   last month", or "Monday of next week". I will NOT add these date
	   formats to Date::Manip. Since I have received the request several
	   times, I decided to include my reasoning here.

	   Date::Manip can parse pretty much any static date format that I
	   could think of or find reference to. Dates such as "today", "Jan
	   12", or "2001-01-01" are all understood.

	   These are fairly limited however. Many very common date formats are
	   best thought of as a date plus a modification. For example,
	   "yesterday" is actually determined internally as "today" plus a
	   modification of "- 1 day".  "2nd Sunday in June" is determined as
	   "June 1" modified to the 2nd Sunday.

	   As these types of formats were added over time, I quickly realized
	   that the number of possible date plus modification formats was
	   huge. The number of combinations has caused the parsing in
	   Date::Manip to be quite complex, and adding new formats
	   occasionally causes unexpected conflicts with other formats.

	   The first time I received a request similar to "the 15th of last
	   month", I intended to add it, but as I analyzed it to see what
	   changes needed to be made to support it, I realized that this
	   needed to be expressed as a date plus TWO modifications. In other
	   words, today modified to last month modified to the 15th day of the
	   month.

	   As bad as date plus modification formats are, a date plus TWO
	   modifications would be exponentially worse. On realizing that, I
	   made a firm decision that Date::Manip will NOT support this type of
	   format now, or at any time in the future. Although I apologize for
	   the inconvenience, I do not intend to change my position on this.

       Date::Manip is slow
	   NOTE: The following section applies primarily to 5.xx. I'm doing a
	   lot of work to optimize Date::Manip and I will rewrite this section
	   to take this into account, and to provide performance suggestions.
	   It should be noted that initial tests show version 6.xx to be
	   around twice as fast as 5.xx (though still considerably slower than
	   some of the other modules).

	   Date::Manip is probably one of the slower Date/Time modules due to
	   the fact that it is huge and written entirely in perl.

	   Some things that will definitely help:

	   ISO-8601 dates are parsed first and fastest.	 Use them whenever
	   possible.

	   Avoid parsing dates that are referenced against the current time
	   (in 2 days, today at noon, etc.).  These take a lot longer to
	   parse.

	   Business date calculations are extremely slow.  You should consider
	   alternatives if possible (i.e. doing the calculation in exact mode
	   and then multiplying by 5/7).  Who needs a business date more
	   accurate than "6 to 8 weeks" anyway, right :-)

       RCS Control
	   If you try to put Date::Manip under RCS control, you are going to
	   have problems.  Apparently, RCS replaces strings of the form
	   "$Date...$" with the current date.  This form occurs all over in
	   Date::Manip.	 To prevent the RCS keyword expansion, checkout files
	   using:

	      co -ko

	   Since very few people will ever have a desire to do this (and I
	   don't use RCS), I have not worried about it, and I do not intend to
	   try to workaround this problem.

       Using functions/methods which are not supported
	   There have been a handful of incidents of people using a function
	   from Date::Manip which were not documented in the manual.

	   Date::Manip consists of a large number of user functions which are
	   documented in the manual. These are designed to be used by other
	   programmers, and I will not make any backwards incompatible changes
	   in them unless there is a very compelling reason to do so, and in
	   that case, the change will be clearly documented in the
	   Date::Manip::Changes6 documentation for this module.

	   Date::Manip also includes a large number of functions which are NOT
	   documented. These are for internal use only.	 Please do not use
	   them!  I can (and do) change their use, and even their name,
	   without notice, and without apology!	 Some of these internal
	   functions even have test scripts, but that is not a guarantee that
	   they will not change, nor is any support implied. I simply like to
	   run regression tests on as much of Date::Manip as possible.

	   As of the most recent versions of Date::Manip, all internal
	   functions have names that begin with an underscore (_). If you
	   choose to use them directly, it is quite possible that new versions
	   of Date::Manip will cause your programs to break due to a change in
	   how those functions work.

	   Any changes to internal functions will not be documented, and will
	   not be regarded by me as a backwards incompatibility. Nor will I
	   (as was requested in one instance) revert to a previous version of
	   the internal function.

	   If you feel that an internal function is of more general use, feel
	   free to contact me with an argument of why it should be "promoted".
	   I welcome suggestions and will definitely consider any such
	   request.

KNOWN COMPLAINTS
       Date::Manip 6.xx has gotten some complaints (far more than 5.xx if the
       truth be told), so I'd like to address a couple of them here.  Perhaps
       an understanding of why some of the changes were made will allay some
       of the complaints.  If not, people are always welcome to stick with the
       5.xx release. I will continue to support the 5.xx releases for a couple
       years (though I do NOT plan to add functionality to it).

       These complaints come both from both the CPAN ratings site:

	  http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Date-Manip

       and from personal email.

       Requires perl 5.10
	   The single most controversial change made in 6.00 is that it now
	   required perl 5.10.0 or higher. Most of the negative feedback I've
	   received is due to this.

	   In the past, I've avoided using new features of perl in order to
	   allow Date::Manip to run on older versions of perl.	Prior to perl
	   5.10, none of the new features would have had a major impact on how
	   Date::Manip was written, however that changed in 5.10.

	   One of the aspects of Date::Manip that has received the most
	   positive response is the ability to parse almost every conceivable
	   date format.	 Unfortunately, as I've added formats, the parsing
	   routine became more and more complicated, and maintaining it was
	   one of the least enjoyable aspect in maintaining Date::Manip . For
	   several years, I've been extremely reluctant to add new formats due
	   to the fact that too often, adding a new format broke other
	   formats.

	   As I was rewriting Date::Manip, I was looking for ways to improve
	   the parsing and to make maintaining it easier. Perl 5.10 provides
	   the feature "named capture buffers". Named capture buffers not only
	   improves the ease of maintaining the complex regular expressions
	   used by Date::Manip, it makes it dramatically easier to add
	   additional formats in a way that is much less likely to interfere
	   with other formats. The parsing in 6.00 is so much more robust,
	   extensible, and flexible, that it will make parser maintenance
	   possible for many years to come at a fraction of the effort and
	   risk.

	   It was too much to turn down. Hopefully, since 5.10 has been out
	   for some time now, this will not prohibit too many people from
	   using the new version of Date::Manip. I realize that there are many
	   people out there using older versions of perl who do not have the
	   option of upgrading perl.  The decision to use 5.10 wasn't made
	   lightly... but I don't regret making it. I apologize to users who,
	   as a result, cannot use 6.00 . Hopefully in the future you'll be
	   able to benefit from the improvements in 6.00.

	   One complaint I've received is that this in some way makes
	   Date::Manip backwards incompatible, but this is not an accurate
	   complaint. Version 6.xx DOES include some backwards
	   incompatibilities (and these are covered in the
	   Date::Manip::Migration5to6 document), however in almost all cases,
	   these incompatibilities are with infrequently used features, or
	   workarounds are in place to allow deprecated features to continue
	   functioning for some period of time.

	   Though I have no data to confirm this, I suspect that 90% or more
	   of all scripts which were written with Date::Manip 5.xx will
	   continue to work unmodified with 6.xx (of course, you should still
	   refer to the migration document to see what features are deprecated
	   or changed to make sure that you don't need to modify your script
	   so that it will continue to work in the future). Even with scripts
	   that need to be changed, those changes should be trivial.

	   So, Date::Manip 6.xx is almost entirely backward compatible with
	   5.xx (to the extent that you would expect any major version release
	   to be compatible with a previous major version).

	   The change is only in the requirements necessary to get Date::Manip
	   6.xx to run.

	   Obviously, it's not reasonable to say that Date::Manip should never
	   be allowed to switch minimum perl versions. At some point, you have
	   to let go of an old version if you want to make use of the features
	   of the newer version. The question is, did I jump to 5.10 too fast?

	   The complaints I see on the CPAN ratings complain that I no longer
	   support perl 5.6 and perl 5.8.

	   With respect to 5.6, perl 5.6 was released in March of 2000 (that's
	   before Windows XP which was released in 2001). To be honest, I
	   don't really feel much sympathy for this complaint. Software that
	   is 9 years old is ANCIENT. People may choose to use it... but
	   please don't complain when new software comes out that doesn't
	   support it.

	   The argument for perl 5.8 is much more compelling. Although 5.8 was
	   released quite some time ago (July of 2002), there were no major
	   perl releases until 5.10 came out in December of 2007, so 5.8 was
	   state-of-the art as little as 2 years prior to the release of
	   Date::Manip 6.xx.

	   I agree completely with the argument that abandoning 5.8 only 2
	   years after it was the current version is too soon. For that
	   reason, I will continue to support the Date::Manip 5.xx releases
	   for some years to come. I don't know exactly how long I'll continue
	   to support them, but it'll be at least 2-3 years. Once perl 5.10 is
	   5 years old, I'll be much more likely to drop support for the 5.xx
	   releases, but I DO want to make use of the features of 5.10 for
	   future development.	They make development so much easier, and the
	   parsing so much more robust (something I've wanted for years), that
	   I'm not willing to give up the advantages of 5.10.

	   But the next complaint is relevant.

       Automatic installs break
	   A more important problem is that versions 6.01 through 6.07 broke
	   automatic installs for older perl installations. If you try to
	   install Date::Manip using the automatic tools (cpan/cpanp), they
	   will look for the most recent version. If you are using a version
	   of perl older than 5.10, this fails, and rather than looking for an
	   older version, the tool simply reports a failure in installing
	   Date::Manip.	 Technically, the problem is not due to Date::Manip
	   itself, but is a result of how perl modules are currently managed.
	   However, since Date::Manip is managed by then, it's important to
	   avoid causing this type of problem (which I clearly failed to do).

	   As of Date::Manip 6.10, this problem should no longer occur.
	   Starting with version 6.10, both the 5.xx and 6.xx versions of
	   Date::Manip have been combined into a single distribution (so
	   Date-Manip-6.10 contained both Date::Manip 6.10 and Date::Manip
	   5.57). From Date::Manip 6.10 to 6.13, the perl version was
	   determined at install time and either the 5.xx or 6.xx version was
	   installed.  From Date::Manip 6.14 on, both versions are installed,
	   and at run time, the correct version will be chosen (and if you're
	   running a recent version of perl, you can select to run the old or
	   new version).

	   All future version (for as long as 5.xx is supported) will include
	   both the most current 5.xx and 6.xx releases of Date::Manip. In
	   this way, automatic install tools will be able to install
	   Date::Manip regardless of which version of perl you are running.

       Too many modules
	   One minor complaint is that there are too many files. One person
	   specifically objects to the fact that there are over 470 modules
	   covering non-minute offsets. This complaint is (IMO) absurd.
	   Date::Manip supports ALL historical time zones, including those
	   with non-minute offsets, and so there will be information for those
	   time zones, even though they are not currently in use.

	   I could of course store all of the information in one big module,
	   but that means that you have to load all of that data every time
	   you use Date::Manip, and I find that to be a very poor solution.
	   Instead, storing the information in a per-time zone and per-offset
	   manner dramatically decreases the amount of data that has to be
	   loaded.

	   While it is true that Date::Manip includes over 900 modules for all
	   of the time zone information, most implementations of time zone
	   handling also choose to break up the data into a large number of
	   files.

	   My linux distribution (openSuSE 11.2 at the time of writing this)
	   uses the standard zoneinfo database, and at this point, there are
	   over 1700 files included in /usr/share/zoneinfo (though it does
	   appear that there is some duplication of information). Current
	   versions of RedHat also use over 1700 files, so Date::Manip isn't
	   treating the time zone problem in a new or unreasonable way.

       Objects are large
	   One complaint that was put on the CPAN ratings site was that the OO
	   interface is "a dud" due to the size of it's objects. The complaint
	   is that a Date::Manip::Date object is 115K while it should
	   (according to the complaint) only require that you need to save the
	   seconds from the epoch, zone, and a couple other pieces of
	   information, all of which could probably be stored in 100 bytes or
	   less.

	   Date::Manip is very configurable, and contains a great deal of
	   information which could theoretically be calculated on the fly, but
	   which would greatly reduce it's performance. Instead, the data is
	   cached, and since the data is virtually all potentially object
	   specific, it has to be somehow linked to the object.

	   For example, Date::Manip allows you to parse dates in several
	   languages.  Each language has a large number of regular expressions
	   which are used to to the actual parsing. Instead of recreating
	   these regular expressions each time they are needed, they are
	   created once and stored in an object (specifically, a
	   Date::Manip::Base object).

	   Similarly, a description of the time zones are stored in a second
	   object (a Date::Manip::TZ object).

	   The size of the Date::Manip::Base object is almost 15K. The size of
	   the Date::Manip::TZ object is 100K. That may seem excessive, but
	   you have to remember that there are almost 500 time zones, and they
	   have to be indexed by name, alias, abbreviation, and offset, and by
	   the time you do this, it does take a fair bit of space.  The size
	   of the actual Date::Manip::Date object is a little over 300 bytes.

	   Both the Date::Manip::Base and Date::Manip::TZ objects are reused
	   by any number of Date::Manip::Date objects. They can almost be
	   thought of as global data, except that they are accessible in the
	   standard OO manner, and you are allowed to modify them on a per-
	   object basis which WILL mean that you have to store more data. If
	   you work with multiple configurations (see Date::Manip::Config),
	   you'll need multiple Base and TZ objects. However, most of the time
	   you will not need to do this.

	   The Date::Manip::Date object is a bit larger than suggested in the
	   complaint, but it should be noted that Date::Manip actually stores
	   the dates in a number of different formats (a string of the form
	   YYYYMMDDHH:MN:SS and a list [YYYY,MM,DD,HH,MN,SS] in the time zone
	   it was parsed in, the local time zone (if different) and GMT. By
	   caching this information as it is used, it has a huge impact on the
	   performance.

	   So, Date::Manip in typical usage consists of one 100K
	   Date::Manip::TZ object, one 15K Date::Manip::Base objects, and any
	   number of small 300 byte Date::Manip::Date objects.
	   Date::Manip::Delta objects are even smaller. Date::Manip::Recur
	   objects are also small, but they contain any number of Date objects
	   in them.

	   I am certainly open to suggestions as to how I can improve the OO
	   interface... but I don't believe it is a dud. While I'm not an
	   expert at OO programming, I believe that I followed pretty standard
	   and accepted procedures for accessing the data.

	   Please refer to the Date::Manip::Objects document for more
	   information.

       Date::Manip has an inconsistent interface
	   I've gotten a few complaints that the interface to Date::Manip is
	   inconsistent... and I agree (at least when using the functional
	   interfaces).

	   Date::Manip was originally written in an unplanned way... as a
	   need/want came up, it was extended. That's not the way to write a
	   major package of course, but it wasn't expected to be a major
	   package at the start.

	   As it became more and more widely used, I too wished for a more
	   consistent interface, but I did not want to break backward
	   compatibility for everyone using it.

	   When 6.xx was written, I spent a good deal of time trying to make a
	   very standard interface, so I do not believe that this complaint
	   can be applied to the OO interface (though I'm interested in
	   suggestions for improving it of course).

	   As far as the functional interface goes, I'll continue to support
	   it in a backward compatible (and therefore inconsistent) form. I'd
	   encourage the use of the OO interface whenever possible.

BUGS AND QUESTIONS
       If you find a bug in Date::Manip, please send it directly to me (see
       the AUTHOR section below).  Alternately, you can submit it on CPAN.
       This can be done at the following URL:

	  http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=Date-Manip

       Please do not use other means to report bugs (such as Usenet
       newsgroups, or forums for a specific OS or Linux distribution) as it is
       impossible for me to keep up with all of them.

       When filing a bug report, please include the following information:

       Date::Manip version
	   Please include the version of Date::Manip you are using.  You can
	   get this by using the script:

	      use Date::Manip;
	      print DateManipVersion(1),"\n";

	   or

	      use Date::Manip::Date;
	      $obj = new Date::Manip::Date;
	      print $obj->version(1),"\n";

       Perl information
	   Please include the output from "perl -V"

       If you have a problem using Date::Manip that perhaps isn't a bug (can't
       figure out the syntax, etc.), you're in the right place.	 Start by
       reading the main Date::Manip documentation, and the other documents
       that apply to whatever you are trying to do.  If this still doesn't
       answer your question, mail me directly.

       I would ask that you be reasonably familiar with the documentation
       BEFORE you choose to do this. Date::Manip is a hobby, and I simply do
       not have time to respond to hundreds of questions which are already
       answered in this manual.

       If you find any problems with the documentation (errors, typos, or
       items that are not clear), please send them to me. I welcome any
       suggestions that will allow me to improve the documentation.

KNOWN BUGS
       None known.

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 v5.16.3			  2014-02-08	      Date::Manip::Problems(3)
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