Date::Manip::History - phpMan

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.

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 AT cpan.org)