ITL status

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

I believe the ITL project is ready for a review and a beta release.  If all
things look well enough we should also work on that integration we talked
about awhile back of both the hijri and prayer into a single cohesive
'libitl' library (not sure how best to do this and how to structure it
in CVS, etc).  I've added the necessary man pages for both 'ipraytime'
and 'idate' end-user applications and have tested the code on linux and
solaris without issue (thanks again Thamer and Samy for your help).  'ical'
will be forth coming in the future (no need to wait for it now).  A couple
of things to note though with regard to the 'hijri' code,

 1. The umm_alqura code is... well... not user-friendly (but it seems to
    work).  It would really be best if someone reimplemented that module
    and/or cleaned it up.

 2. The 'common' (non-umm_alqura) date convertion used in based on some
    sample code I found from reingold and co. from 1990.  Roozbeh has noted
    a more updated book from him which will undoubtedly contain improvements
    on the algorithm used - I haven't had the time to look into the book,
    so if anyone is interested, do please let us know.

In both instances, the API should remain the same which will only affect
the guts of the library.

A logo will hopefully be forth coming (I have just posted a request on
Arabeyes' "general" list), but what we need now is any comments/feedback
so that we can move safely into integrating those two pieces of code into
a single library and release the code (we need to replace the to-be-yanked
'hdate' package :-).

Salam.

 - Nadim


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