[Python-Dev] PEP 431 Time zone support improvements (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Dec 29 07:00:39 CET 2012

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 6:23 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

Happy Holidays! Here is the update of PEP 431 with the changes that emerged after the earlier discussion.

A raw download is here: https://raw.github.com/regebro/tz-pep/master/pep-04tz.txt

For UI purposes, "pytz" has some helpers to get lists of timezone names (all, common and country specific): http://pytz.sourceforge.net/#helpers

Is there a specific reason you chose to exclude those from the PEP?

Discussion ==========

Should the windows installer include the data package? ------------------------------------------------------ It has been suggested that the Windows installer should include the data package. This would mean that an explicit installation no longer would be needed on Windows. On the other hand, that would mean that many using Windows would not be aware that the database quickly becomes outdated and would not keep it updated.

I'm still a fan of always shipping fallback tzdata, regardless of platform. The stdlib would then look in three places for timezone data when datetime.timezone was first imported:

  1. the "tzdata-update" database
  2. the OS provided database
  3. the fallback database

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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