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

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at haypocalc.com
Tue Feb 16 12:52:06 CET 2010

Hi,

Le Tuesday 16 February 2010 11:38:05 anatoly techtonik, vous avez écrit :

So far, Python timezone handling is far from "pythonic". There is no function to get current UTC offset, (...)

There is the time.timezone attribute: UTC offset in seconds.

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.

Is it no possible to extend Python datetime module in Python?

There are already 3rd party libraries:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytz http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-timezones http://www.egenix.com/products/python/mxBase/mxDateTime/ ...

Can't why integrating an existing module (well tested, with a documentation, an user base, etc.)?

I am sure many current Python users will appreciate UTC functions and improved date/time API more than any new language features.

Sure, the current API is complex and has few documentation.

That's why I would like to propose this enhancements for a coding spring on forthcoming PyCon.

Excellent idea :)

--

There are also some interesting open issues about the datetime module:

http://bugs.python.org/issue1289118 - timedelta multiply and divide by floating point http://bugs.python.org/issue1673409 - datetime module missing some important methods http://bugs.python.org/issue2706 - datetime: define division timedelta/timedelta http://bugs.python.org/issue2736 - datetime needs and "epoch" method

Bugs about old timestamps:

http://bugs.python.org/issue1726687 - Bug found in datetime for Epoch time = -1 http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412 - Python's strftime dislikes years before 1900 http://bugs.python.org/issue2494 - Can't round-trip datetimes<->timestamps prior to 1970 on Windows

Victor

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