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

Stuart Bishop zen@shangri-la.dropbear.id.au
Mon, 17 Mar 2003 14:51:42 +1100

On Sunday, March 16, 2003, at 04:07 PM, Tim Peters wrote:

Worse, if the platform tzset() isn't happy with TZ's value, it has no way to tell you: the function is declared void, and has no defined effects on errno.

Yup. It sucks, but is the best there is. I can't even find proprietary solutions for various Unix flavours. Maybe a post to Slashdot saying Zope 3 will be Windows only due to limitations in POSIX would at least get something for the free distros :-)

I hope the community takes up the challenge of building a sane cross-platform time zone facility building on 2.3 datetime's tzinfo objects.

A cross-platform time zone facility isn't a problem - the data we need is available and maintained as part of numerous free Unix distributions. We could even steal C code to decode it if we are particularly lazy.

The trick is that updates to coutries' timezone changes don't follow the Python release schedule, and I think this was covered in depth on python-dev not long ago in excruciating details that I'm sure no one wants to repeat :-)

So the actual problem would be how to distribute data file updates to Python installations, which would also mean we could support the various ISO standards relating to things like country codes and languages (which I'm sure many of us are currently doing manually).

Possibly a script that could be run as the user-who-owns-the-python-installation to update from source forge, which python-announce as the notification channel when files are updated?

-- Stuart Bishop <zen@shangri-la.dropbear.id.au> http://shangri-la.dropbear.id.au/