[cl-l10n-devel] local time handling

[Sean Ross]

Attila Lendvai wrote:
> 
> fyi, there's a very good-looking time handling library at: 
> http://www.bitmuse.com/code/local-time/
> 
> i'll play with it in the next days and probably replace the 
> net-telent-date dependency of ucw with it. and in the meantime i'll keep 
> an eye on the idea and the possible effects of dropping the same time 
> code from cl-l10n that is also available in net-telent-date and which is 
> in fact mostly the time handling code in cmucl that was dropped from sbcl.

Funny you should mention that, the parse-time.lisp file that is currently
in cl-l10n is a modified version of the code from cmucl which was
changed to handle locale specific timestrings and months in a decent way
(although it's still far from complete).

So we are already handling time/date parsing and time/date printing
(via the ~U directive when format is shadowed, or format-time) although
the interaction between dates, times and timezones hasn't been looked
at properly.

My main concern with local-time is that it is *Nix specific (attempts
to load timezone information from /etc/localtime) and i'm currently
developing on Windows right now, yes pity me.

What is completely missing in cl-l10n is date/time comparisons.
I'm still not too sure what is the best way to go about this, sticking
with straight numerical representations for time, while handy, still
feels a little wrong.

I'm pretty fond of clsql's wall-time and duration classes (along
with various operations on them). What i would like to see, without
thinking about it too much, is wall-time and duration moved into a separate
package which we could use.


Cheers,
  Sean.