[Python-Dev] tzset (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Sun, 16 Mar 2003 00:28:04 -0500

[Stuart Bishop]

... To me, this is the useful format as all the others require you to know your DST transition times rather rely of the OS to supply them.

But since there are no defined names in POSIX, supplying transition rules explicitly via the second POSIX format is the only way that has a shot at being portable.

At the moment if the 'path to a tzfile(5)' format is not accepted, your tzset(3) is considered broken and time.tzset not built.

I'll let the Unix weenies straighten out their own mess here .

I'm happy to rewrite the detection in configure.in and the test in testtime.py to lower the bar on this, but I think a better solution may be to determine if Windows has a format that lets us to DST calculations and keep the bar high.

I couldn't parse that, but I've got no interest in exposing the Windows version of tzset() to Python users regardless (it's a lame effort to mimic part of the Unixish TZ gimmicks; the Win32 API has a richer way to deal with time zones, which doesn't use environment variables).