phpman > perldoc > Date::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.

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)