GDateTime support

["thiagossantos gmail com" <thiagossantos gmail com>]

Hello,

for the last month I've been pushing and working on datetime support for glib, all the progress is at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50076.

As a starting point I took Christian Hergert's great work on http://audidude.com/?p=342 and started working from there to get to a small, but usable API so we could add this incrementally, easing review and bug catching.

The hard part here is mostly about having timezones supported in all platforms. So, for a starting point, there is a patch pending review on the bug that adds GDateTime support for representing datetimes in local and utc timezones only. I think this is a minimum feature to be supported and is enough to get in (others might disagree, of course). Just representing datetimes would be a great addition to glib.

After getting this in, my plan is to add wider timezone support by using tzdata, which should be available in most systems (linux, solaris, mac) and could be shipped in others (windows) together with glib. If anyone has a better idea on how to have an uniform timezone support, please tell me. The third step would be to add functions to manipulate datetimes, mostly for adding them.

I'm trying to answer on the bug and update the patch with review critics ASAP, and I've seen some interest in this feature while hanging out on IRC. The reason I'm writing this mail is to make this public to people that aren't reading bugzilla updates, so they can give their opinion/review on the patches. And also to ask if some developer with larger glib experience and/or commit access could review the patch and point me to a direction that might lead to getting GDateTime in.

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Regards,
Thiago Sousa Santos