On Sun, 12 Oct 2003, Paul Eggert wrote:
Thanks for the heads-up. I'll propose something like the following xhtml in my next proposed tz update. Comments welcome. (I must confess that at Twin Sun we've avoided DateTime in our Perl code for performance reasons -- I didn't know it had tz support these days.)
Hmm? It's had tz support since the very beginning. In fact, one of the main reasons for writing _new_ modules was to provide a useful Perl API to the Olson database, since previously the only way to do anything with timezones was to do something like "$ENV{TZ} = 'foo/bar'; POSIX::tzset()". That won't get you very far if you need to deal with datetimes in _multiple_ timezones all at once. As for performance, it's definitely slower than a lot of the alternatives, except for those cases where it's the _only module_ that does what you need, which is true for quite a number of things.
<li><a href="http://search.cpan.org/dist/DateTime-TimeZone/">DateTime::TimeZone</a> contains a script <code>parse_olson</code> that compiles <code>tz</code> source into <a href="http://www.perl.org/">Perl</a> modules. It is part of the Perl <a href="http://datetime.perl.org/">DateTime Project</a>, which is freely available under both the GPL and the Perl <a href="http://www.perl.com/language/misc/Artistic.html">Artistic License</a>. DateTime::TimeZone also contains a script <code>tests_from_zdump</code> that generates test cases for each clock transition in the <code>tz</code> database.</li>
Looks good. -dave /*======================= House Absolute Consulting www.houseabsolute.com =======================*/