And you have to watch out with Western dates too ... Take Pepys diary. While you would probably have no desire to store these dates, those between January and March every year belong to which year? (New Year was March 25th). The only safe way to store these things (if you do want to future-proof it in any way) is to store all dates as a Julian/Conversion pair. Julian as in an explicit offset from a fixed date (eg the Unix ?1/1/1970? day 1) and a conversion that says Julian/Gregorian/Republic/Japanese Imperial/whatever. Not a trivial conversion if you haven't planned that in in your original design :-( Cheers, Wol -----Original Message----- From: news-misc@ada.dhs.org [mailto:news-misc@ada.dhs.org] Sent: 10 December 2002 04:55 To: koha-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Koha-devel] Re: non-simple publication years? In article <200212042234.54111.fmmarzoa@gmx.net>, Francisco M. Marzoa Alonso <fmmarzoa@gmx.net> wrote:
I think that's a matter of representation, so database structure could be as is (with that sort integer) and scripts could be modified to support different dating standards simply making conversions. Although I think this does need change some scripts, not just templates, because as it seems to be your case, sometimes the matter is an input value on a form.
The same is applicable to date formats on different countries or using different standards. (i.e. some countries use DD-MM-AAAA while others use MM-DD-AAAA). I think there may be some kind of support for this in koha so it should be not very difficult to adapt it for your chinesse years, but I'm not sure.
I guess then this would be something for Koha 3.0 :-) In our library not all dates are in "Chinese" format ("Republic" years, now used only in the ROC); we only lists the Republic dates if the book lists them. I wondered whether this is just a peculiarity of our library, so I went to another library (http://mdx.tpml.edu.tw/v2.3/tables/01a.htm) and see how they do it. They do it just the same; not all books are listed in Republic dates, just some (presumably also just the books which lists dates in this format). So, sticking with the principle that Koha should not dictate how users use the system, we cannot go the conversion route :-) Also, if we go a conversion route, it will also be quite complicated, because one A.D. year may correspond to two or more years in the "foreign" calendar. (For example, the Chinese and Japanese dates are based on the reign of kings, and the king has the say what the new epoch is called (so we can never "future-proof" Koha if we go the conversion route); so one A.D. year can correspond to two Japanese years if, e.g., they get a new Japanese emperor :-) It could get messier if the foreign calendar system is not solar :-( [not the case with modern Chinese and Japanese dates, though] -- Ambrose Li <a.c.li@ieee.org> http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/cmcc/ http://www.cccgt.org/ DRM is theft - We are the stakeholders ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-devel This transmission is intended for the named recipient only. It may contain private and confidential information. If this has come to you in error you must not act on anything disclosed in it, nor must you copy it, modify it, disseminate it in any way, or show it to anyone. Please e-mail the sender to inform us of the transmission error or telephone ECA International immediately and delete the e-mail from your information system. Telephone numbers for ECA International offices are: Sydney +61 (0)2 9911 7799, Hong Kong + 852 2121 2388, London +44 (0)20 7351 5000 and New York +1 212 582 2333.