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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Oct 1 21:09:16 CEST 2012

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 12:02 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

On Oct 02, 2012, at 12:18 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Reminder to everyone: the current state of the art for getting up to date tz info for Python is "pip install pytz".

If any proposal is more complicated than that, there's absolutely no point in changing anything. The version I liked best so far is for Python to just install a copy of pytz automatically (shipping it in the installer rather than downloading it). OS packagers would then take it out (replacing it with a dependency on a pytz emulator that used the system database instead). Why wouldn't the stdlib just ship with that emulator by default then? If your OS doesn't have a system database, then you pip install pytz ftw.

I think those are all suggestions included in Nick's intention. The main points are that (a) pytz and some not-too-ancient Olson database are included by default, (b) vendor distributions can tweak the packaging so that the platform's copy of the Olson database is used automatically; (c) users not benefitting from such vendor support can update the database as easily as "pip install pytz" (though not necessarily with that specific command).

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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