[local-time-devel] Questions & minor Clozure CL/OpenMCL issue

[Daniel Lowe]

Arjan Wekking wrote:
> 1. What's up with local-time development lately? There appears to be
> little activity since March.

Hi, Arjan.  There's actually been quite a bit, but it's been on the 1.0 branch.
 We've been trying to get the code to the point where we're comfortable freezing
the API.  I think we're almost to that point - we'll make an announcement when
we release.

> 2. The TODO mentions intervals; what plans are there to add them and how
> will they be used? Have you seen the way Joda-Time defines intervals,
> durations and periods? What *are* the intervals mentioned in the TODO
> anyway?

This is more a question of representing duration, and periods of time (timestamp
+ duration).  There's more of a pragmatic question as to whether or not to
support a representation of duration which includes multiple units of time.

> 3. Clozure CL does not like #.+some-constant+ and/or #.(-
> +some-other-constant+) since it apparently has not yet defined constants
> at read time (makes sense, perhaps). Removing #. in these cases works of
> course, but I'm wondering why read-time evaluation was used and whether
> I'm missing something here (they *are* constants, after all)?

In all likelihood, they started as defparameters and were changed to constants
later.  It behaves fine in sbcl, but should certainly be changed.

> 4. Is (my) help welcome? If so, how can we contribute? What is the
> preferred way to offer and discuss patches like my (possibly wrong)
> Clozure CL fix?

The most useful thing you could do would be to check out the 1.0 branch and
offer comments.  You can find it at
http://common-lisp.net/projects/local-time/darcs/local-time-1.0

Thanks for your interest.

: Daniel :