Re: Proposal for Changes to PEAR::Date

Firman Wandayandi wrote:

Mason, On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Mason Malone <mrmalone@gleim.com> wrote:

1) Migrate entire package to PHP5. As many of you know, PHP4 has been discontinued and there will be no more updates to it, security-related or otherwise, after August 8 (see http://www.php.net/archive/2008.php#2008-01-03-1), so I think it's a good time to drop PHP4 support. Also, the release of PHP6 is in sight, and supporting all three major versions of PHP is going to be impractical if not impossible, as I understand it.

I have planned to create the Date2 which is written in PHP5 syntax strict also PHP6 if possible. It's not migrate entire package, but create it from scratch and use the bundled DateTime and DateTimeZone object to work. May also keep or remove the existing classes such as Date_Calc, Date_Span. Yet it is still not started since we busy to kick the Date's bugs.

2) Add an option to not load the $_DATE_TIMEZONE_DATA array and instead use the built-in PHP 5 DateTimeZone class for getting timezone data. However, I'm not really sure if this is feasible, since I can't figure out how DATE_TIMEZONE_DATA was generated. Keys such as 'longname' and 'dstlongname' do not appear to have any basis in the latest zoneinfo database. If I'm missing something, please tell me. Otherwise, I can take the additional metadata that can't be found using DateTimeZone and store it in a separate array (generated from $_DATE_TIMEZONE_DATA at packaging time), which would only be loaded when the aforementioned option is turned on. Some lazy loading functionality will be incorporated so loading of the array will be deferred until it's needed.

Use the DateTimeZone to grab the data is better for sure.

Plus there is no need to keep BC with a PHP5 rewrite so using the DateTimeZone data makes more sense. One thing though with a Date package is to make sure it provides real value over using the DateTime class directly. Other than that it is a good idea to port that package to PHP5. Arnaud.