[Python-Dev] Add UTC to 2.7 (PyCon sprint idea) (original) (raw)

anatoly techtonik techtonik at gmail.com
Tue Feb 16 11:38:05 CET 2010

Hello,

So far, Python timezone handling is far from "pythonic". There is no function to get current UTC offset, intuitive API to get DST of current time zone and whenever it is active, no functions to work with internet timestamps (RFC 3339). In my case [1] it took about one month and five people to get the right solution for a valid RFC 3339 timestamp. One of the reasons I see is that date/time functions are implemented in C, they expose C API, and there are not many people who can help and patch them.

I am sure many current Python users will appreciate UTC functions and improved date/time API more than any new language features. That's why I would like to propose this enhancements for a coding spring on forthcoming PyCon. I am located in Europe and can't attend PyCon, but I summarized date/time issues related to UTC below.

More open UTC-related Python issues: http://bugs.python.org/issue1647654 No obvious and correct way to get the time zone offset http://bugs.python.org/issue1667546 Time zone-capable variant of time.localtime http://bugs.python.org/issue7662 time.utcoffset() http://bugs.python.org/issue7229 [PATCH] Manual entry for time.daylight can be misleading http://bugs.python.org/issue5094 datetime lacks concrete tzinfo impl. for UTC http://bugs.python.org/issue7584 datetime.rfcformat() for Date and Time on the Internet (support RFC 3339, ISO 8601 datetime format) http://bugs.python.org/issue665194 datetime-RFC2822 roundtripping http://bugs.python.org/issue6280 calendar.timegm() belongs in time module, next to time.gmtime()

All solutions require C expertise. If it will be impossible to find experts able to modify current implementation, then perhaps it could be real to create Python stub for coding solution in Python later?

FWIW, this proposal is from my other issue about problems with Python date/time in separate tracker on Google Code [2].

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue7582 [patch] diff.py to use iso timestamp [2] http://code.google.com/p/rainforce/issues/detail?id=10 python: date/time is a mess

anatoly t.

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