Mdate was written to fill a need: a simple, freely-available program for non-academic people interested in the Mayan calendar. Except for the Emacs Mayan calendar mode (which has some severe limitations), this has been lacking on all popular operating systems, which is odd considering the continuing public interest in the Mayan civilisation.
Mdate has been in continuous development for over four years, mostly due to the limited interest in such a program by programmers, but fortunately not by users.
This document was formerly licensed under the GNU FDL 1.1. It now falls under the general GPL license of the accompanying code. Previous versions of this documentation may, if wished, also fall under GPL on contact with the author.
Copyright (c) 2002-2009 by Sean Dwyer.
Please freely copy and distribute (sell or give away) this document in any format, providing you adhere to the terms of the above License. It's requested that corrections and/or comments be forwarded to the document maintainer.
The current version of Mdate is 1.5.6, written by Sean Dwyer with help from many others over the years.
The first public version of Mdate was 0.5.0, written in late 1998, and was also ported to MS-DOS. Craig Robbins contributed to versions 0.5.1 to 1.0.0beta1. Version 1.0.0beta1 (1999) was the first GPL version of Mdate, and included a Tk interface.
Mdate 1.0.5 was internationalised, and was quickly followed by version 1.1.0, also the first version at the new sourceforge.net home.
Mdate 1.2.0 was modularised into a library (libmdate) and front-ends for Tk, command-line and GTK+.
Mdate 1.2.8 was the last libmdate-dependent and frontend-oriented Mdate, by now suffering from too much setup code and neglect.
Mdate 1.3.0 dropped the libmdate dependence, had a total rewrite in C++/C and a much simpler build system, although still missing internationalisation support and needing new front-ends.
Mdate 1.3.4 added a simple translation layer, following the mplayer method.
Mdate 1.4.0 brought in user date formatting (like date(1)), and began
the process of proper internationalization and configuration., still using the
example of mplayer.
The first BeOS port was made in Mdate version 1.4.1.
Mdate 1.4.2 enhanced the language support by making it a runtime choice per an option.
Mdate 1.4.3 added a mingw32 cross-compiler port and allowed different language defaults.
Mdate 1.4.5 included a compile-time option to use modern Mayan calendar month names.
Mdate 1.4.7 introduced the first FreeBSD (4.9-STABLE) port. The program-parseable flag (-p) was rendered defunct when the parseable output became the default output format. A new OS X (Mac 32-bit console) port also became available.
Mdate 1.5.2 switched the VC system over to subversion, with intentions to open up development with a better multiple developer system.
Mdate 1.5.6 was the first new release of mdate since version 1.5.1 on sourceforge.net.