Chrono for GNU Octave

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DEPRECATED! This repo is deprecated and no longer worked on. The Chrono package has been merged into the Tablicious package, and new work is going on there instead. See https://github.com/apjanke/octave-tablicious

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Date/time functionality for GNU Octave.

This package attempts to provide a set of mostly-Matlab-compatible date/time classes and functions, including datetime, duration, calendarDuration, and their related functions. It has support for time zones and time zone conversion.

This is an improvement over datenum and datevec for both advanced applications and basic everyday use. It brings both more advanced functionality (time zones, variable-length calendar math) and friendly basics (dates that display as human-readable dates instead of big numbers).

A quick example:

% Old and busted:
>> dt = now
dt =  737442.0260426451
>> convertTimeZone(dt, 'America/New_York', 'Europe/Berlin')
error: 'convertTimeZone' undefined near line 1 column 1

% New hotness:
>> dt = datetime
dt =
 17-Jan-2019 00:37:40
>> dt.TimeZone = 'America/New_York'; dt.TimeZone = 'Europe/Berlin'
dt =
 17-Jan-2019 06:37:40 Europe/Berlin

Installation and usage

Quick start

To get started using or testing this project, install it using Octave’s pkg function:

pkg install https://github.com/apjanke/octave-chrono/releases/download/v0.3.1/chrono-0.3.1.tar.gz
pkg load chrono

Installation for development

• Clone the repo.
  • git clone https://github.com/apjanke/octave-chrono
• Add the inst/ directory from the repo to your Octave path.
• Build the octfiles.
  • octave_chrono_make_local.m will do this. Just run octave_chrono_make_local in Octave while your cwd is the octave-chrono repo.

Requirements

Chrono runs on Octave 4.4.0 and later. It would be nice to have it work on Octave 4.0.0 and later (since Ubuntu 16 Xenial has Octave 4.0 and Ubuntu 18 Bionic has Octave 4.2); maybe we’ll do that.

It should run on any OS supported by Octave. It’s only tested on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

On Windows 7 and earlier, Java is required to detect the system default time zone.

Building Chrono requires a compiler. That means you need to install Visual Studio Community on Windows, or Xcode on macOS.

Documentation

The user documentation is in the doc/ directory. See doc/chrono.html or doc/html/index.html for the manual.

The developer documentation (for people hacking on Chrono itself) is in doc-project/. Also see CONTRIBUTING if you would like to contribute to this project.

“Internal” code

Anything in a namespace with internal in its name is for the internal use of this package, and is not intended for use by user code. Don’t use those! Resist the urge! If you really have a use case for them, post an Issue and we’ll see about making some public API for them.

License

Chrono is Free Software. Chrono contains material licensed under the GPL, the Unicode license, and Public Domain.

• All the code in this package is GPLv3.
• The Unicode windowsZones.xml file redistributed with this package is under the Unicode license. See LICENSE-Unicode for details. Full info is available on the Unicode website.
• The IANA time zone database ("zoneinfo") redistributed with this package is Public Domain.

Author and Acknowledgments

Chrono is created by Andrew Janke.

Shout out to Mike Miller for showing me how to properly structure an Octave package repo, and encouraging me to contribute.

Thanks to Sebastian Schöps for getting me more involved in Octave development in the first place, via his Octave.app project.

Thanks to David Bateman and the creators of the Octave-Forge communications package for providing an example of what a good Octave pkg doco generation setup looks like.