[dokuwiki] Re: A small idea
- From: Michael Klier <chi@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 02:28:12 +0100
Balazs Attila-Mihaly (Cd-MaN) wrote:
> One question: I saw that the date formatting method was changed from "date"
> to "strftime" (around mid-February) and the stated reason was something
> related to localized month/day names (sorry for not having the exact quote
> handy). However this breaks many plugins in ugly ways, and while the fix is
> not that hard (basically searching the plugin source code for "date" and
> replacing it with "strftime"), may I suggest an alternative approach:
>
> - create a different configuration variable for the "strftime" formatting
> string - provide migration to/from the two settings (ie if only one is
> set, the other should be created programatically). this shouldn't be all
> that difficult, since all that needs to be done is mapping a set of
> identifiers to a different set of identifiers (for example Y <-> %Y)
>
> The drawback of this is that you can have non-localized day/month names
> appear on your wiki until the given plugin provides an updated version.
> However this is still the lesser evil of the two alternatives (the other
> being that the site gets littered by "%" where "date" is used format the
> time)
Although I understand your point (I have to update some plugins too to reflect
that change too, and I already see the forum been hit by a wave of "where does
this '%' come from" threads ;)), I think that the introduction of a new $conf
setting, just to prevent "cosmetical" bugs in plugins, would lead to a much
more unwanted situation, namely that the plugin authors don't even notice that
something has changed and that they need to update their plugins accordingly.
Not all of them follow the mailinglist or the changes of the development
version that closely, and in the end, the migration might just never happen
because no one would notice anything.
As you said, "fixing" this is just a matter of replacing the date() calls with
strftime(). I know we're all lazy, but plugin authors who care about their
work will update them, hopefully at least after being bugged by enough annoyed
end-users ;), and I think we should not introduce work-arounds to keep the
ones who might have missed this small change up to now from noticing it ;).
Just my 2 cents,
Chi
PS: This will most certainly be mentioned in the official release announcement
of the upcoming DW release as "important change for plugin authors".
--
Michael Klier
www: http://www.chimeric.de
jabber: chi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
key: http://downloads.chimeric.de/chi.asc
key-id: 0x8308F551
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