Re: Re: [PEPr] Comment on Date and Time::Date_Holidays

Stephan Schmidt wrote:

Hi,

... but this whole package is just a duplication of what you could do by taking a decent iCalendar library and putting it together with a list of data files, and maybe putting some utility methods on top of it. Solves the driver problem, makes it much easier to integrate into existing systems, makes use of a lot of existing data, and you don't reimplement tricky recurrence rules/text descriptions for them.

I still wouldn't require it for the first version for the following reasons: 2. If a user needs a new driver for his country or any other special cases, he'll have to learn the ICS format to build a new data file instead of building a new PHP file.

Maybe not that of a bad thing. IMHO ICS, iCard and iCal are under used.

3. Implementing full support for ICS files will be a lot of work. AFAIK File_IMC only parses a file and returns an array with its content. It currently does not do anything with the RRULE property of any event. This has to be implemented in the Date_Holidays Driver. But as this is Carsten's proposal, we'll have to wait whether he is willing to implement ICS support, before or after the package is approved or not at all...

Performance wise, I would leave ICS out of Date_Holidays. Now, Date_Holidays should be able to import iCalendars using File_IMC... On the other hand, events in a iCalendar are much more than simple date and they are not strict "holidays" per se. So there may be a need of a Date_Calendar_Events package, or alike, to truely handle events as meant in iCalendar... -Philippe