Re: [Discussion] Add date_test_set_now() function

On Mon, Jul 1, 2024, at 15:07, Go Kudo wrote: > Hi, Internals. > > I've been absent for a long time due to poor health. I'm finally back. > > I maintain a legacy application written in PHP, and occasionally need to fake the current time > for testing purposes. However, PHP doesn't provide a standard way to fake the current time, so > I've been changing the OS's current time to do this, which is quite painful. > > This can be avoided by using third-party libraries (such as Carbon::setTestNow()). However, > it's almost impossible to modify all parts of a legacy application that depend on the current > time. > > Another option is to use libfaketime (https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime), but this is also > quite painful to use. > > Since this was absolutely necessary for my work, I implemented this functionality as a PHP > Extension. (Please ignore the dirty implementation related to PDO. I'm not planning to propose > it this time.) > > https://github.com/colopl/php-colopl_timeshifter > > However, this Extension has some problems. > > The first is that there's no way to determine whether the format passed to the ext-date > parser is relative or absolute time, resulting in a dirty hack using usleep. The second is that it > depends on timelib, so it breaks when upstream changes related to timelib are made. > > So, how about adding a date_set_test_now(\DateInterval > $shiftInterval) function to ext-date? > > This function would treat the current time as shifted by the passed DateInterval. Since > it's implemented on the ext-date side, there's no need for dirty hacks using usleep. > > I'd like to hear your opinions. Thank you. > > Best Regards, > Go Kudo Welcome back! I think this is an interesting proposal and very useful. I think many people may be concerned about it being used in a non-testing context, but I don’t think we should stop people from being creative. If people find a use for it outside of testing, that would be interesting to see. The fact they can already do this today via carbon just makes a point that this is valuable to those of us who don’t like adding dependencies. Ps. Anytime someone mentions PSR, have your favorite drink. It’ll help take the edge off. :) In all seriousness, PSR doesn’t apply universally and shouldn’t ever be a valid argument on this list. That’s my 2¢ anyway, best of luck to you. — Rob