Date::Manip::Changes6(3)

NAME
Date::Manip::Changes6 - changes in Date::Manip 6.xx

SYNOPSIS
This describes the changes made to the Date::Manip module in the 6.xx series of releases. Major changes are marked with asterisks (*).

For the most part, Date::Manip has remained backward compatible at every release, but occasionally, a change is made which is backward incompatible. These are marked with an exclamation mark (!).

VERSION 6.xx (planned 2013-12-01)

VERSION 6.xx (planned 2013-09-01)

VERSION 6.xx (planned 2013-06-01)

VERSION 6.39 2013-03-01

Added the $mode argument to ParseDateDelta
    The ParseDateDelta function (in functional interface) did not allow you to force a parsed delta to semi or approx where appropriate. This was added. Based on RT 82991).

Added get_config method
    The get_config method was added to all classes. Suggested by Philippe Poilbarbe.

Language fixes
    Fixed a German language problem. Gosta Oelstrom

Documentation fixes
    Documented workaround for dmake problem in strawberry perl. Discussed on perlmonks and RT 79837.

    Clarified the Examples page. Winston Heng

VERSION 6.38 (2013-01-08)

(*) Tar file format corrected
    Problems were reported on several OSes by people unable to install Date::Manip (and other modules). It turns out that the version of tar distributed by my linux distro (OpenSuSE) uses the 'posix' format instead of the traditional 'gnu' format by default. This causes problems for some versions of tar. I have had reports from OSX, Windows, and SunOS. Future versions of Date::Manip will be explicitly distributed in the 'gnu' tar archive format.

    Reported by Jay Allen and RT 80594.

(*) Date::Manip 5.xx end-of-life
    Date::Manip 5.xx is now officially out of support. I will not be doing any further work on it. The only exception is that I will consider adding user supplied patches on a case-by-case basis.

    If at all possible, please use Date::Manip 6.xx instead.

(!) Removed some deprecated config variables
    The following config variables have been removed.

       IntCharset
       RecurNumFudgeDays

VERSION 6.37 (2012-12-01)

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where ISO 8601 format YYYY-WXX-D didn't work if the week ended up in December. Gordon Lugauer.

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2012j)

Documentation fixes
    Spelling error fixed. RT 80621

VERSION 6.36 (2012-10-31)
This was an interim release to fix the version numbers (6.35 was released with all of the version numbers 6.34).

VERSION 6.35 (2012-10-31)
This was an interim release to fix the problem with the PATH being replaced.

Removed dependency on YAML
    I've reverted the language data files to perl literals instead of YAML. Though not quite as easy to maintain, it solves a few problems. Patch provided by Christopher Madsen.

Bug fixes
    Last versions fix for RT 78566 overrode the PATH even when that wasn't appropriate. This is fixed. Report and patch supplied by RT 80435.

VERSION 6.34 (2012-09-04)
This is a bug fix so that the PATH won't break non-unix installs.

Bug fixes
    Put the PATH inside the Unix section so it doesn't affect non-unix environments. Geoff Rowell

VERSION 6.33 (2012-09-01)

Improvements to Date::Manip::Delta
    Added convert method. This had been planned since 6.30, but based on a discussion with Henrique Martins, I moved it up in priority.

    Cleaned up handling of delta field lengths (they are now only calculated once.

    Added cmp method. Henrique Martins

Bug fixes
    The language modules read from the DATA section, but I never closed the filehandle. This is fixed now. Patch by Doru Theodor Petrescu

    Added better loading of DM5/DM6 modules. RT 78512

    Added a secure PATH to TZ.pm for taint reasons. In response to RT 78566

Time zone fixes
    Now supports timezones in files with spaces where there should be underscores. This occurs in RHEL desktop. RT 78566

    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2012e)

Documentation fixes
    Minor fix. Henrique Martins

VERSION 6.32 (2012-06-01)

Modified Build.PL
    Build.PL now has better support for building (or not building) HTML files. Apparently this is slow on Windows. Patch provide in RT 75118.

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug in business day calculations. RT 76336

    Fixed a bug where Delta/Recur objects weren't correctly created. Zsban Ambrus

    Fixed a bug where SetDate/ForceDate config variables could not be included in a file. Jerry Wilcox

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2012c).

Documentation fixes
    Better support for UTF-8 in autogenerated language module pod files.

VERSION 6.31 (2012-03-01)

Added extended formats to printf method.
    These include the %<A=NUM>, %<a=NUM>, %<v=NUM>, %<B=NUM>, %<b=NUM>, %<p=NUM>, and %<E=NUM> formats. Chris Jackson

Can now parse formats where the time and zone are not adjacent
    A string like 'Jan 21 17:13:27 2010 -0400' can now be parsed. Requested on perlmonks ('Can Date::Manip parse a unix timestamp' thread).

Added PeriodTimeSep config variable.
    This allows you to use a period as a time separator. Ed Avis

Holidays can be used as date strings
    You can now parse a holiday name in the Date::Manip::Date::parse method. For example, parse('Christmas'). Requested by Abigail.

Added new recur modifiers
    Added WDn, IBD, and NBD modifiers.

Added a new date format
    You can now parse '2nd day in May' formats. Randy Harmon

More flexibility in parsing timezones with both offset and abbrev
    If you include both the offset and abbreviation in the timezone portion of a date, the parenthesis around the abbreviation are now optional, so you can parse both:

       -04:00 (EDT)
       -04:00 EDT

    Requested by Steven Melendez.

Deltas now support fractional values.
    You can now use a delta of 1.5 days. RT 42699

Multiple holidays supported
    A date may now have multiple holidays. Keith Minkler

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where abbreviations were not being examined case insensitively. Jurgen Muck

    The Holidays section may be safely split across multiple config files. A bug prevented this from working before.

Language fixes
    The Norwegian translation was broken due to a typo in the language module.

    Included complete documentation for each language.

    Fixed a couple problems with Danish. Nicholas Oxhaj

    Added Finnish (from a VERY old mail that I overlooked somehow). Iikka Virkkunen

    Cleaned up the values used by printf directives to give the expected result.

Documentation fixes
    Fixed a typo. Nicholas Bamber

VERSION 6.30 (2012-01-11)

(*) (!) Reworked deltas
    Much of the delta code was reworked.

    The constraint that a day is treated as 24 hours was removed (by adding the concept of semi-exact deltas) to better handle daylight saving time calculations.

    Made cosmetic changes to which signs will be included in a delta to make the deltas more readable. Signs which are the same as the next higher field will be omitted, even if they cross set boundaries.

    Added support for non-normalized deltas. See the $no_normalize option for the parse and set methods.

    Removed limitations on subtract=2 not working with business calculations.

    Thanks to discussion on perlmonks, and RT 65774 that prompted me to do this. I'd been wanting to do it for some time, but the discussion on perlmonks made me realize that this needed to be much higher priority.

(!) Modified Delta_Format
    In conjunction with the above work, added the 'semi' mode to Delta_Format.

(!) Removed some deprecated config variables
    The following config variables have been removed.

       GlobalCnf
       IgnoreGlobalCnf
       PersonalCnf
       PersonalCnfPath
       PathSep

       Internal
       DeltaSigns
       UpdateCurrTZ
       ConvTZ
       OldConfigFiles
       ResetWorkDay

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2011n). RT 71595

    Corrects a bug where +0000 and -0000 offsets were not parsed correctly. Aaron Hall

    The zoneinfo data includes rules more than 20 years in the future, so we now store 30 years of future dates instead of 20 to catch these rules.

    When parsing the timezone portion of the date, timezone abbreviations now take higher precedence than zone names (since that is how timezone information is typically specified). That only impacts dates where the a timezone name is the same as an abbreviation, such as 'CET'.

    Previously, a date with CET in it was interpreted as in the CET timezone. Now it is interpreted as in a timezone with the CET abbreviation.

Better handling of undef in DM6
    The date/delta parsing routines in DM6 will now handle an undef argument without issuing a warning. Earl C. Ruby III

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug with the parse_format %f and %i formats. Tommi Rintala

    Fixed a bug where the Date::Manip::Delta::set function didn't work to set the month value.

    Fixed a bug where parsing some dates near during a DST change failed.

    Minor bug fix when using Delta_Format. Prompted while investigating RT 41095.

VERSION 6.25 (2011-08-31)

Relaxed one constraint in ISO 8601 dates
    A time separated by whitespace from the date can use a single digit hour. Yuming Philip Xiang

(*) Set official removal dates for old config variables
    Config variables will be removed 2 years after they are deprecated (except for the TZ variable which, due to it's wide use, will be kept for 4 years).

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2011i)

VERSION 6.24 (2011-06-13)

New features
    Spaces are ignored in the SetDate/ForceDate config values. Zsban Ambrus

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where 'in one week' wasn't correctly parsed. E. M. Shtern

    Fixed a bug where options passed in to the 'new' as a listref weren't handled properly. Zsban Ambrus

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2011g)

VERSION 6.23 (2011-04-15)

(!) Renamed one Date::Manip::Recur method
    The Date::Manip::Recur::base method has been renamed to basedate . The Date::Manip::Recur::base method should return the Date::Manip::Base object like all the other Date::Manip modules.

(*) Reworked holidays defined as recurrences
    Improved dealing with the bootstrap problem of defining holidays, especially those that contain business day flags. Mike Tonks

New features
    The printf function will now take multiple format strings and return a list of values. Zsban Ambrus

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where GlobalCnf wasn't working. Peter Edwards

    Improved error messages in a few cases.

    Fixed a bug where one invalid date/timezone check was ignored. Morten Bjornsvik

    Fixed a bug where '$base2 = new Date::Manip::Base $base1' wasn't working. RT 67143

    Fixed a bug where passing dates in to the Recur->dates method failed. RT 67144

    Fixed a bug where the mode wasn't being preserved correctly for a delta. RT 67150

    Fixed a bug in recurrences where a base date outside of a date range with a very uncommon recurrence format would not work correctly.

    Fixed a problem where the '%s' printf option didn't work in GMT. Jean-Michel Hiver

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2011f)

Documentation fixes
    Fixed two bad recurrence examples in the documentation. Peter Edwards and Mike Tonks

VERSION 6.22 (2011-03-07)

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2011b)

    Fixed a bug where the gmtoff method of getting the local timezone was broken. Martin Zinser.

    Fixed the 'env' method of determining the local time zone to allow the value to be an offset of seconds since UTC. This allows the VMS SYS$TIMEZONE_DIFFERENTIAL variable to work correctly. Martin Zinser.

    Removed the SYS$TIMEZONE_RULE method from VMS since the value stored there is not the name of a timezone (it's a rule in a non-standard format). Based on discussion with Martin Zinser.

    Improved the order in which aliases, abbreviations, etc., are tested to test current usage before non-current usage (there were a few cases where old usages were getting tested before current usage.

Language fixes
    The module will now die if a language module cannot be loaded (most likely due to a YAML::Syck issue). Based on discussion with Martin Zinser.

Documentation fixes
    Added a sample config file document. Based on discussion with Rich Duzenbury.

VERSION 6.21 (2011-01-10)

New features
    Deltas may now contain spelled out numbers, so 'in 2 weeks' and 'in two weeks' will both work. Daniel Shahaf

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where week_of_year didn't work in some cases. Chris Eveland.

    Fixed a minor potential bug. Geraint Edwards.

Time zone fixes
    Updated windows time zone aliases. Daniel Harding

Language fixes
    Added Norwegian. Glenn Sogn

VERSION 6.20 (2010-12-01)

(*) (!) Reworked recurrences
    Recurrences were reworked in a (slightly) backward incompatible way to improve their usefulness (and to make them conform to the expected results). Most recurrences will work the same as previously, but a few will differ. Most of this was suggested by Jay Jacobs.

    A recurring event is now calculated relative to the base date, NOT relative to a previous event. For example, if a recurrence occurs every month, and the base date was Jan 31, then previously, recurring events would have been (in a non-leap year):

       D(0)                   = Jan 31
       D(1)  = D(0) + 1 month = Feb 28
       D(2)  = D(1) + 1 month = Mar 28
       ...

    The new behavior is:

       D(0)                       = Jan 31
       D(1)  = D(0) + 1*(1 month) = Feb 28
       D(2)  = D(0) + 2*(1 month) = Mar 31
       ...

    Previously, if a base date were not specified, it was not determined from the date range. Now, the start date of the date range acts as the base date.

    The meaning of the base date has changed slightly. It is much more meaningful and useful now.

    Added iterator functions. Daniel LaLiberte

    The RecurNumFudgeDays variable is no longer used and is deprecated.

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2010o)

VERSION 6.14 (2010-10-20)

(*) Date::Manip 5.xx fully integrated with 6.xx
    Date::Manip 5.xx and 6.xx are both installed automatically, and the correct one will be chosen.

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where recurrence handling was broken. RT 62128

Documentation fixes
    A lot of documentation was cleaned up to be easier to read, and better organized.

VERSION 6.13 (2010-10-13)

New features
    Added the input methods to Date::Manip::Date and Date::Manip::Delta. Ed Avis.

    The 'date +%z' command will also be used to determine the timezone. Oliver Schulze

Bug fixes
    Several changes to try to get rid of a memory leaks reported in RT 54937. Huge thanks to BrowserUK on perlmonks for help. Unfortunately, it ended up being a bug in perl, and will only be resolved when that bug is fixed. See the Date::Manip::Problems document for more information.

       Reorganized Base/TZ to get rid of circular references.
       Added end blocks to clean some global variables.
       Got rid of switch/given structures.

    Fixed a bug where an incomplete date with 'last' in it was causing an error. RT 60138

    Fixed a bug where 'Sunday, 9th Jan 1972' wasn't parsed correctly. RT 57832

Time zone fixes
    Fixed a bug where Zones.pm was generated with the abbreviations in the wrong order. Amish Chana.

Language fixes
    French month abbreviations now support periods. Bernard Haerri

Test fixes
    Added tests from RT 29655 to make sure that the problem never recurs.

Documentation fixes
    Fixed documentation problem with the new_* methods in Date::Manip::Obj. Options must be passed in as \@opts rather than @opts.

    Cleaned up some of the documentation.

VERSION 6.12 (2010-09-27)

(!) IntCharSet config variable deprecated
    With better support for international character sets, the old IntCharSet config variable (which was a bandaid at best) is deprecated. Currently, the functionality still exists, but it will be removed at some point.

New features
    Added the Encoding config variable.

    Now supports parsing the EXIF date format. Rhesa Rozendaal

Bug fixes
    Fixed Build.PL to not require perl 5.010 since the distribution as a whole does not require that (and I want that fact to be in META.yml).

    Fixed a bug where the Date::Manip::Date::set method was broken when setting individual fields. Helmut A. Bender

    Fixed a bug where set didn't work in Date::Manip::Delta. Patch provided in RT 59096.

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2010m)

Language fixes
    (*) Converted all language files to UTF-8 and added rudimentary support for character encodings. Some assistance by Stephen Ostermiller.

    Fixed problem in Polish, Dutch. Stephen Ostermiller

    Extended support for 'nth' up to 53rd. Paco Regodon

    Added some corrections to German. Dieter Lange

Documentation fixes
    Clarified Date::Manip::Recur documentation based on RT 59132.

VERSION 6.11 (2010-04-30)

Bug fixes
    Fixed a problem in Build.PL that had an incorrect module requirement.

VERSION 6.10 (2010-04-29)

(*) Combined 5.xx and 6.xx releases into one distribution
    Because the automatic module management tools cpan/cpanp would try to upgrade Date::Manip to the most recent version, and the most recent version will only work if perl 5.10.0 or higher is installed, both the 5.xx and 6.xx releases are now combined into a single distribution.

    This is described more fully in the Date::Manip::Problems document.

(!) Zones specified by offset
    In all operations involving time zones, the time zone must be determined. By default, it would take all of the information available (date, ISDST, etc.) and determine the most likely time zone. It would take every time zone that matched each piece of information, starting with those that matched in a standard time followed by those that matched in a daylight saving time.

    When zones are specified by an offset, a standard time would always match since there are standard time zones that match all year long (the military time zones A-Z and the standard time zones of the form Etc/GMT+01). As a result, a daylight saving time match would never occur.

    Since (if the date falls during a daylight saving time period) you usually want to use a time zone that has that offset in daylight saving time, the default is now to check daylight saving time zones first, followed by standard times.

    See the Date::Manip::TZ manual (under the zone method) for more information.

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where Date_ConvTZ not working correctly with time zones specified by offset. Chris Butler

    Fixed a bug where business mode calculations involving minutes was not handled correctly. Damien Moore

    Fixed a bug where business mode calculations failed in some cases. RT 56638

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2010i)

    Changed Date::Manip::TZ::zone so "dst" is sometimes the default $dstflag. Based on the bug report by Chris Butler.

    OpenUNIX puts a colon at the start of some time zones. It's removed. Jean Hassler

Test fixes
    Converted tests to Test::Inter

Documentation fixes
    Fixed a documentation bug in Date::Manip::TZ where "stdonly" was listed as the default value for $dstflag, but in actuality, "std" is the default.

VERSION 6.07 (2010-02-05)

Bug fixes
    Fixed bug in Date_TimeZone where it wasn't returning the time zone. Robert Eden

VERSION 6.06 (2010-02-05)

Bug fixes
    Minor bug where %Z printf format didn't always work.

    Added support for 5pm back in (it was omitted accidentally). Mark Kennedy

    Fixed a minor warning. Morten Bjoernsvik

    Some additional speedups.

Time zone fixes
    Newest zoneinfo data (tzdata 2010b)

    Added dm_zdump example script.

    Improved TZ::periods functionality

    Fixed bug in Date_ConvTZ where empty values weren't defaulting to local time zone. Robert Eden

    Fixed a couple of problems in the generated time zones for some odd cases (America/Resolute and Asia/Tehran).

VERSION 6.05 (2009-12-09)

(!) %z format
    In Date::Manip 5.xx, the %z format in UnixDate printed the offset in the form -0500. In 6.00, I changed that to -05:00:00, but this broke RFC 822 compliance.

    I've changed %z back to -0500, and introduced a new format (%N) which returns -05:00:00.

    Incidentally, this is the LAST unused letter, so I am now going to have to either stop adding formats, or add some extended format syntax. Not sure yet which, but this may involve a backwards incompatible change in the future.

(*) Significant speedups.
    Thanks to Moritz Lenz and BrowserUK on perlmonks for suggestions (and a number of other people on perlmonks for suggestions that I did not end up using, but which provided a great discussion).

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug in parse_date where the current time was getting used instead of the documented 00:00:00

    Bug fix where DateCalc didn't work with $mode in some cases.

    Fixed Makefile.PL/Build.PL to handle Win32::TieRegistry requirement.

    Changed %z printf behavior back to 5.xx and added %N format. Gilles Lamiral

    Added dm_date example script.

Time zone fixes
    Fixed bug where non-English Windows versions didn't get the time zone. Thanks to Rene Schickbauer for testing.

Test fixes
    Reduced the precision of 1 test to avoid a rounding difference when using a perl compiled with uselongdouble. Andreas Koenig

VERSION 6.04 (2009-11-25)

Bug fixes
    Fixed a bug where events were not interpreted in the correct time zone if SetDate/ForceDate used.

VERSION 6.03 (2009-11-24)

Bug fixes
    Corrects a backward incompatibility with UnixDate. Rene Schickbauer

Test fixes
    A couple more corrections to the tests.

VERSION 6.02 (2009-11-24)

Bug fixes
    Disabled curr_zone_methods when taint checking on. I believe that Date::Manip is completely taint friendly at this point.

Test fixes
    A quick fix to make sure that the tests run correctly in other time zones.

VERSION 6.01 (2009-11-23)

Bug fixes
    (*) Fixed a bug where dates were sometimes getting the wrong time zone when SetDate/ForceDate in effect.

VERSION 6.00 (2009-11-23)
Date::Manip 6.00 is a total rethink of the module, and a nearly complete rewrite. Please refer to the Date::Manip::Changes5to6 document for a list of incompatible changes.

Reorganization
    (*) Massive reorganization and near total rewrite.

    (*) Broke into several smaller modules

New Features
    (*) Full time zone support (using tzdata 2009s)

    Added some functionality (suggested by James Elson to improve setting the "current time". Done with the ForceDate config variable.

    (*) Converted languages to YAML for much easier maintenance. Patch and suggestion provided by Evan Carroll

    Added much better formats for deltas. Suggested by Jim Hranicky.

    Borrowed the _FindWindowsTZName function from the DateTime-TimeZone module.

    Added SetDate config variable (based on a suggestion by Christian Campbell).

    Added parse_format which was first suggested by Kim Ryan.

Other changes
    Several config variables deprecated

    Thanks to Jonathan Hogue for helping test Windows additions.

Bug fixes (correcting problems in the 5.xx releases)
    Fixed a bug where "YYtoYYYY=c" wouldn't work.

    VMS bugfix to not call `date` command. Lane

    New Year's Day defined using a recurrence which might push the observed day to the previous year was broken. Reported by Jerry Wilcox.

Language fixes
    Fixed typo in Turkish translation.

    Spelling fix in Dutch. Bart Van Loon

Additional credits
    I have received many suggestions over time which were automatically handled during the 6.00 rewrite. Although the changes weren't made because of the suggestions specifically, I wanted to acknowledge them since I appreciate the suggestions.

    I believe the first person to suggest writing Date::Manip as an OO module was Eduard Derksen.

    Delta_Format initialization done outside of the function. Eric Boehm

    Added $subtract to calculation routines. First suggested by Steve Berlage.

    Added ability to set individual parts of the date (Date::Manip::Date::set). First suggested by Martin Thurn.

    UnixDate (i.e. Date::Manip::Date::printf) only calculates formats when they are needed. Eduard Derksen

    Parsing will skip some date/time formats if requested. This was first suggested by Eduard Derksen.

    It has been suggested several times to support multiple languages, multiple config files, or multiple sets of Date_Init options. These suggestions (by Meng Fang, Ed Avis, Christian Campbell, and perhaps others) were at the back of my mind as I developed the Date::Manip::Base class.

    The regular expressions are all i18n friendly in anticipation of much better support for localization. First suggested by Alex Kapranoff.

    Parsing a date ('today', 'Monday') gives a time of '00:00:00'. Suggested by Mark Aitchison.

    Working with fractional days was suggested by Peter van Hardenberg. This is implemented in Date::Manip::Base::day_of_year method.

BUGS AND QUESTIONS
Please refer to the Date::Manip::Problems documentation for information on submitting bug reports or questions to the author.

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)