[Development] Calendar Systems proposal

[Edward Welbourne]

Soroush Rabiei wrote:
> Nowadays, almost all major programming frameworks support calendar
> globalization. We are a small group of developers working with
> non-Gregorian calendars and we believe Qt must support this too. This
> proposal discusses details of our plan (and early implementation) to
> add support for multiple calendar systems in Qt library.

Excellent initiative.  I've only had time for a cursory review (I'm
running away for mid-winter after today, not back until January, and
have a few other irons in the fire to get into a sensible state before I
go) so shall have to read in greater depth next year.  However, one
thing did cross my mind in reading:

How about having the QCalendarSystem object be an optional parameter to
various methods of QDate, that configures how it behaves, with the
default behaviour being that of the Gregorian system ?  This has the
advantage that client code might be able to supply a custom
QCalendarSystem object, where an enum-based solution can only know about
the ones that the Qt project has chosen to support.

Presumably every calendar system can be referred back to the Julian date
[0], so most of the QCalendarSystem API would just implement methods
mapping Julian date to the chosen calendar's year, month, day &c.

[0] which, lest anyone be confused, has nothing to do with the Julian
calendar - which *is* still in use ...


For the sake of anyone who hasn't understood why calendar system isn't
related to locale (or time-zone, or anything else particularly), note
that members of a culture that traditionally uses another calendar may
want to deal with a government-imposed (probably Gregorian) calendar
for all their work planning while using their culture's traditional
calendar when organising family and community events.  A conference
centre organiser, furthermore, may want to be able to switch freely
between calendars to get a view of their diverse guests' perspectives in
order to avoid cultural gaffes and be ready to accommodate
complications.  Even if there's nothing religious about the conference,
knowing that it happens to fall in Ramadan will prime the conference
centre staff to be ready to accommodate any attendees who won't be
eating during the hours of daylight,

	Eddy.