[Python-Dev] Stdlib and timezones, again (original) (raw)

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Mon Oct 1 15:34:47 CEST 2012

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

If a timezone database is bundled into the standard library, there are 3 clear mechanisms for encouraging the use of fresh TZ data:

1. Consider TZ database updates to be bug fixes, and thus include them in maintenance releases. This will keep the provided version reasonably fresh for Python versions that are still in maintenance mode. 2. Provide a mechanism to prefer the database from PyPI. 3. Provide a mechanism to prefer the OS database for platforms that provide an Olson compatible interface (I briefly looked into that for Windows a while back - it doesn't seem like a practical idea, since Microsoft went off and did their own thing. It works for Linux and other platforms that use the Olson database natively, though) Since explicit is better than implicit, I wouldn't want to see magical side affects where merely installing the database from PyPI, or switching from Windows to Linux caused different behaviour. However, it should be very easy for an application or environment to explicitly request the use of the pytz database or the OS database in preference to the bundled database.

I proposed 2 and 3, and I don't really see much magical side-effects with those. As mentioned we can also include a database in the standardlib, but since that will almost always be out of date, I don't really see the point. It is of course only an issue on Windows, but still.

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