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Date-Manip (6.07)

I'm dumbfounded that anyone would update an existing module and not make it compatible with earlier perl releases, especially considering the inability to specify specific module versions in prerequisites.

Could the author not have at least created a new module called Date::Manip510 for those who wish or are able to upgrade their perl.

That way the rest of us can continue to install software in a perl5.6/perl5.8 environment without having to manually install the older release.

Tom Howe - 2010-02-09 09:09:01
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Date-Manip (6.05)

I am really loathe to give negative reviews, but I'm notably unimpressed that release 6.x of Date-Manip has a requirement on Perl 5.10. Backward compatibility was sacrificed for "the ability to do named capture buffers". I'm very sorry, but while I feel the author is completely free to do whatever he desires with his own distribution, I find the decision to mandate 5.10 quite unfortunate. As another reviewer had mentioned, this decision will have negative affects in various enterprise environments.

Other than this one unfortunate decision, the distribution is otherwise quite excellent.

Adam J. Foxson - 2010-01-31 11:20:37
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Date-Manip (6.07)

This was one of my favorite modules, but the 6.x release is a huge step backwards. I'm going to have to use 5.54 forever I guess. Requiring 5.10 is going to lock quite a few people out, especially in large enterprise environments where it's already difficult to deploy CPAN stuff. It's sad really... but I still see a lot of perl5.6 out there.

Paul Miller - 2010-01-30 19:42:38
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Date-Manip (6.05)

I would like to comment on the review by Sam Vilain commenting on the large size of the Date::Manip::Date object.

It should be noted that the Date::Manip::Date object actually consists of three different objects. The Date::Manip::Date and Date::Manip::TZ objects are quite small. The Date::Manip::Base object is quite large... it contains a great deal of cached data to improve performance of Date::Manip, many precompiled regexps to match things based on your language, a description of all timezones that you have referenced, etc.

If you use the techniques listed in the Date::Manip::Objects document, additional Date::Manip::Date objects (or Delta or Recur objects) will all share the Date::Manip::Base object, so that's a one-time-only price to pay.

The reward: I'm currently working on thorough benchmarks, but even with all the overhead of doing timezone handling, Date::Manip 6.05 is approximately twice as fast as Date::Manip 5.xx (note that 6.05 is significantly faster than earlier 6.0x releases since I've done a lot of optimizations).

So don't let the size of the first object necessarily scare you away.

Sullivan Beck - 2009-12-09 19:45:27
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Date-Manip (6.01)

Wow, I've been a big Date::Manip fan for a while but the OO interface on version 6 really is a dud. 474 timezone files covering non-minute offsets? Really?

wilber:~/src/Date-Manip-6.01$ perl -Mlib=lib -MDate::Manip::Date -MData::Dumper -le '$Data::Dumper::Indent=0; print Dumper(Date::Manip::Date->new);' | wc -c
115122

Seriously, that's ridiculous - that's far too much data to link to an instance. You cannot sensibly serialize something like that using 'Storable' etc - a shame, because one of the strengths of using Date::Manip has always been its extremely lightweight memory use - 'YYYYMMDDHH:MM:SS+ZZZZ' is a very efficient format.

Does it seriously need more than: [ $iso, $epoch, $offset_sec, $zone ] ?

Sam Vilain - 2009-11-23 21:18:20
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Date-Manip (5.54)

It's a great module and it does what it is advertised.

However, it's rare that my task requires the use of this module, and for that reason, I always find myself referring to the documention; that part always makes me utterly annoyed. I always find myself scrolling back and forth trying to remember what routine(s) I used to use in the past.

To the author I would suggest using more =head elements in the pod - even for every method/function and even arguments. This way one, who probably used the module in the past, can just glance at the Table of Contents and go "Aha! these two are the ones I used before!".

I am a OO freak and would love to see an OO interface in this module instead of having multiple nested routines; other than that. The module rocks.

Zoffix Znet - 2009-09-28 06:58:01
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Date-Manip (5.54)

This is my favorite module for parsing dates, especially when I don't want to spent time figuring out all the possible date formats of my data source. Only in a very few cases have I had to replaced it with a faster date parser. It's ease of use makes it one of the handiest date parsers in CPAN. Thanks Sullivan!

Jeff Kubina - 2009-06-08 20:44:15
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Date-Manip (5.54)

The author of Date::Manip advises to use it only if you have a specific need that other modules can't handle. Other users pointed out problems with Date::Manip at http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?recommended_datetime_modules

Dan Dascalescu - 2009-02-15 23:11:39
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Date-Manip (5.54)

I've been using Date::Manip for years and I need it so often. It is a little quirky, and probably overkill for the simplest cases, but dates always get complicated eventually, so it's worth your time to learn this module.

Nathan Vonnahme - 2008-11-11 12:09:42
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Date-Manip (5.48)

Slow! If you are going to use it to parse tens of thousands of dates, you may look into another module or do the parsing by hand.

On the other hand this is a very complete, well documented module that brings a lot great functionality.It also has a bunch of tests. The code is not documented a lot but it's nice and clean (and big).

A well deserved 5 stars for a module author that does a serious job.

نديم الخمير - 2007-12-11 14:21:25
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