[OpenMadrigal-developers] Updating Madrigal to use Python 2.3

[William Rideout]

I'm planning to include Python 2.3.2 in the next release of Madrigal, 
basically to take advantage of the new datetime module.  This module 
does not depend on unix mktime like the time module, so its allowed 
range of years is 1-9999.  The old time module in Python 2.2 and earlier 
was limited to 1970-2037. This simplifies my implementation of the new, 
date-intensive, Matlab methods.

Note that up to now I've been awkwardly skirting this problem by using a 
Python extension instead that calls the C date module from the madrec 
library.  This solves my problem with accessing the years 1901-1970. 
Note however that this module as presently written still uses gmtime, so 
it will break in 2037.

So my plan for the present is to use the datetime module for all new 
Python code, and wait for a replacement for gmtime before upgrading the 
madrec C library.

Bill



-- 
Bill Rideout
MIT Haystack Observatory
Email: brideout at haystack.mit.edu
Phone: 781 981-5624