significant refactor to simplify and become more DRY.
Also reshaping the structure to align to future plans to replace
the entire workflow approach currently leveraged.
regenerated ChangeLog and generated sample configuration file.
Added test cases for common/timeutil
Added more test cases and removed extraneous lines of code.
added test cases for options module.
made several updates to clean up code and added significant amount of test
code to finally reach ~75% code coverage
code fixes and cleanup