[phobos] Tango and the new time lib

[Steve Schveighoffer]

----- Original Message ----
> From: Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei at erdani.com>
> To: Discuss the phobos library for D <phobos at puremagic.com>
> Sent: Thu, April 29, 2010 11:53:52 AM
> Subject: Re: [phobos] Tango and the new time lib
> 
> I think for practical reasons we should simply stay away from Tango. 
We'd be 
> wasting time otherwise. It's not like they discovered the cure 
for cancer. 
> We're better off just defining better abstractions; think of 
where Phobos 
> was in comparison to Tango before std.algorithm came about.

In the 
> date/time case, we should be looking for inspiration at Boost - 
work that's 
> licensed under better terms, and of good quality to 
> boot.

I developed a bunch of time stuff for Tango, but a lot of it was based on the existing code.  I pretty much recreated the existing API, modeled after C#'s TimeSpan and DateTime.  We can start from there too, since the source isn't easily available, and the API is pretty well described via msdn.  Just whoever does it, document that you never used Tango, and keep good records.  The problem with "staying away from tango" is that any good time library is going to be close to Tango's API (I think that's why SHOO's is!).

I find the idea that Tango has issues with this code to be completely asinine.  Like Andrei said, it's computing dates and times, it's not rocket science.  I checked the complicated code against Tango's (converting a time stamp into date components), and it's obviously not copied.   I don't think I will be contributing to Tango ever again.  I don't want to risk any more copyright infringement...

The only thing that is "copied" is the API, and even that isn't source compatible.

-Steve