Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Le 25/03/14 04:40, IKEDA Soji a écrit :

Hi,

On Mon, 24 Mar 2014 15:30:57 +0100
Guillaume Rousse <address@concealed> wrote:

The Sympa::Tools::Time module contains a few time-related functions, 
mostly related to conversion between string and timestamps formats:
epoch2yyyymmjj_hhmms()
adate()
get_midnight_time()
epoch_conv()
date_conv()
duration_conv()

I overlookded these functions.

epoch2yyyymmjj_hhmms() is used only once;
adate() is never used;
get_midnight_time() is used only once.

Former two may be replaced with strftime() (although locale should
be considered).

parse_date()

Date::Parse::str2time() may be an alternative to
time_utils::parse_date() if it is targetted to Date: header fields.
And anyway nothing is better than the module recently maintained.
I don't stick to this module.

Me neither.
Actually, whichever modules is good to me. Despite the minimal requirement "it must do what we need", my only concern is the actual module maintenance. If it installs correctly, I don't care.
A wide range of functions is always good because we don't know what we'll need in he future and we could have some pretty exotic concerns, such as mail headers analysis or date internationalisation.
In addition, I'll say that, when we chose a module, this should be a definitive choice, in order to simplify package maintainers life...

According to these concerns :

1) Date::Parse (in module TimeDate):
    - last version: 18 February 2013
    - development difficult to apprehend. Last displayed version was in 2009 but it was 1.20 and it is now 2.30, so I think the maintainer just deleted previous versions
 
2) Date::Manip:
    - last version: 3 March 2014
    - development: same as Date::Parse. A big gap between apparent previous and current version
    - Good point : internationalisation is ready: there seem to be packages dedicated to translations.

3) DateTime:
   - last version: 11 March 2014
    - actively developped since 2011

Consequently, I would have some preference for DateTime, as it is impressively detailed AND well maintained. We may miss the internationalization process, but as we do it in Sympa already, we don't really care.
I note that i the Dependencies, there is module called Class::Singleton (written by Andy Wardley, which is a good point for me) that we may use for the questions of singleton we spoke about in recent threads.

Those 300 lines of code would easily be replaced by some perl module 
available from CPAN. Here is a list of potential alternatives:

1) Date::Parse: no dependencies, pure perl, but limited to date string 
conversions (it would not replace duration_conv(), for instance).

2) Date::Manip: few dependencies, pure perl, no idea about the exact 
coverage

3) DateTime framework (DateTime, DateTime::Format::Mail, etc...): 
multiple dependencies, native code, but covers practically everything.

They could be potentially others, but I limited myself to the one known 
to be actively maintained nowadays.

That's basically a choice between a lightweight-but-limited vs 
heavywheight-but-complete external dependency. I'd personaly go for 
DateTime framework, which is basically in line with the "let's get rid 
of old environement constraints", but that's a merely a project 
management decision.

Regards,

--- Soji

--
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David Verdin Études et projets applicatifs
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