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

anatoly techtonik techtonik at gmail.com
Thu Feb 18 13:41:33 CET 2010

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at haypocalc.com> wrote:

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.

It is correct only if DST is not in effect.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:

skip at pobox.com wrote:

While incorporating dateutil into the core would be nice (in my opinion at least), I was really thinking of pytz: http://pytz.sourceforge.net/ Because timezones are defined politically, they change frequently.  pytz is released frequently (multiple times per year) to accomodate those changes:  I can't see any way to preserve that flexibility if the package were part of stdlib.

Actual TZ information can be shipped with every Python release, but.. If pytz package is available and it's newer - library functions may use its data instead. Of course, this should be documented as official way to maintain TZ info up-to-date.

If pytz to be included in standard library - it should still be distributed as separate package to provide more frequent TZ updates and updates to older Python versions.

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

There is no need to stick Pytz in the standard library. It's available on PyPI, updated frequently, etc. What we can do is point to it from the documentation.

It will still require workarounds and bridges to make API in user scripts convenient, i.e.

try: import pytz mydatetime = PytzDatetime() catch ImportError: mydatetime = ClassicDatetime()

The goal is to reduce workarounds and avoid repeated code in Python scripts.

Leaving pytz aside, does everybody feel comfortable with setting a Wave for API design of date/time issues and the stuff to be done? If there will be an API draft and current list of stuff - I can try to do some work in "offline" mode.

-- anatoly t.

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