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 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 it
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 an average of 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 at
that point) 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 of the 32 authors are active today
21 of the 70 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!
If I have missed anyone, please let me know.
2022 Update:
Three of the above packages have now been removed from the list.
Symdump has not been updated since 2017, though the author is still
active, and the package is still available.
Filter is no longer available on CPAN (though the author is still
active).
GD is still maintained but by a new author.
So, it seems like we're down to 4 packages that are actively maintained
by the original author that are older than Date::Manip.
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 v5.36.0 2023-03-05 Date::Manip::History(3pm)
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