Just to put in my opinion... I'd like to see Date::Manip able to parse the date "Thu Jan 21 17:13:27 2010 -0400" directly without having to resort to the parse_format function... so I'll add it to my todo list. The parse_format function is good for catching formats I hadn't anticipated, but this one is common enough I should be able to parse it directly.

It's an unusual format in that the time portion and date portion are intermingled. Date::Manip 6 parses the time and date portions separately, so this format is not a trivial date format to add unfortunately.