Segment7: Time.today going away

Time.today going away

drbrain@segment7.net (Eric Hodel) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:22:32 -0700

So you’ve been using Time::today for some time, and thought it was part of time.rb or ActiveSupport? Well, you’d be wrong. I was!

It turns out that rubygems/specification.rb defines Time::today, and that’s wrong. RubyGems has no business adding methods to the core when it doesn’t need to, so I’ve marked it for removal.

If you want to use Time::today in the future you’ll need to define it in your code somewhere, here is its definition:

require 'time'

def Time.today
  t = Time.now
  t - (t.to_i % 86400)
end unless Time.respond_to? :today

Go ahead and throw it in wherever you think is appropriate. I suggest you do this now.

UPDATED: Now with a better Time::today.

"Time.today going away" by Eric Hodel

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:19:35 -0700

@dlh: No, its better, nearly twice as fast as yours in 1,000,000 iterations.

parse   37.110000   0.550000  37.660000 ( 55.822070)
mktime   2.680000   0.030000   2.710000 (  3.160472)
%        1.430000   0.020000   1.450000 (  1.779844)

"Time.today going away" by dlh

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:29:39 -0700

Um, your updated version is just as awful.

"Time.today going away" by dlh

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:24:46 -0700

How about without parsing a string to get a Time object… (no need to require “time.rb” for Time.parse)

def Time.today
  now = now()
  mktime(now.year, now.mon, now.day)
end

Time.today # => Mon Oct 08 00:00:00 -0400 2007

"Time.today going away" by Eric Hodel

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:21:26 -0700

@Sebastian: I’ve only marked Time::today for removal.

Removal is accomplished in three phases. Phase one is trumpeting it far and wide, where we’re at now. Phase two is warning whenever you call the to-be-removed thing. Phase three is deleting. There will be ample time between the three phases for people to adjust. (Even though they usually don’t.)

"Time.today going away" by Sebastian

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:08:43 -0700

While i fully agree with the rationale of throwing this out of gems, i don’t think this is a good idea at this point at least not for a small dot-x release. I wouldn’t wanna be the one trying to figure this one out and there may be some not reading this blog (come to think of it, screw ‘em!). But seriously, are deprecation warnings an option?

"Time.today going away" by Ben Mabey

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:45:30 -0700

Wow, that would of been a nasty one to figure out. Thanks for the heads up.