[Python-Dev] datetime issues (original) (raw)

Gustavo Niemeyer niemeyer at conectiva.com
Mon Sep 15 12:26:51 EDT 2003

[Gustavo Niemeyer] > Is there any reason for not having a single keyword parameter for > every function accepting a tzinfo instance?

Just the lack of anyone pointing it out in the module's 18-month review process .

Would you belive that I was.. erm.. sleeping!? :-)

> I've noticed that some require 'tz', and others 'tzinfo'. Is it too > late to fix that?

Of course, although it's not too late to add synonyms. It appears that the functions "with a lot of arguments" use tzinfo, and those with only one or two arguments tz now. I doubt anyone would bother to use the tz keyword-arg name for a few-argument function (now(), fromtimestamp(), astimezone()), so I'd rather that those few grow a tzinfo synonym. tz can be deprecated too, if you're bold.

It'd be nice to have these synonyms. I'll put it in my ever growing todo list.

> Also, is there any further work going on to improve the datetime > module?

Not that I'm aware of. I'm not working on it anymore (other than keeping my out for bug reports, of which there have been blessedly few). > I'm not suggesting we should mirror mx.DateTime functionalities, but > two features I miss from mx.DateTime is the DateFrom(), which does > its best to parse a given string, and the RelativeDateTime() > functionality. > > This has probably been raised in the past, so if that's the case, I'm > sorry. Marc-Andre, what's your opinion about reusing code from > mx.DateTime into datetime? > > Anyway, reusing code or not, I'll probably put sometime on it in the > future, if this looks interesting to everyone (after I finish my > current python pendencies, like SRE's recursivity removal). If Guido wanted to stay out of the relatively clear time zone business, I can imagine his interest in trying to guess how to parse date and time strings. Apart from Brett's strptime(), I believe the email module has some useful string->datetime code. It may be good to fold such stuff in this area as Python already supports into datetime somehow.

Cool. I'll give it a try as well. I have a working relativedelta implementation now. I'll polish it a little further and publish it somewhere for tests.

Thanks!

-- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net

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