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

[anatoly techtonik]

Hello,

So far, Python timezone handling is far from "pythonic". There is no
function to get current UTC offset, intuitive API to get DST of
current time zone and whenever it is active, no functions to work with
internet timestamps (RFC 3339). In my case [1] it took about one month
and five people to get the right solution for a valid RFC 3339
timestamp. 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.

I am sure many current Python users will appreciate UTC functions and
improved date/time API more than any new language features. That's why
I would like to propose this enhancements for a coding spring on
forthcoming PyCon. I am located in Europe and can't attend PyCon, but
I summarized date/time issues related to UTC below.

More open UTC-related Python issues:
http://bugs.python.org/issue1647654  No obvious and correct way to get
the time zone offset
http://bugs.python.org/issue1667546  Time zone-capable variant of time.localtime
http://bugs.python.org/issue7662     time.utcoffset()
http://bugs.python.org/issue7229     [PATCH] Manual entry for
time.daylight can be misleading
http://bugs.python.org/issue5094     datetime lacks concrete tzinfo
impl. for UTC
http://bugs.python.org/issue7584     datetime.rfcformat() for Date and
Time on the Internet (support RFC 3339, ISO 8601 datetime format)
http://bugs.python.org/issue665194   datetime-RFC2822 roundtripping
http://bugs.python.org/issue6280     calendar.timegm() belongs in time
module, next to time.gmtime()

All solutions require C expertise. If it will be impossible to find
experts able to modify current implementation, then perhaps it could
be real to create Python stub for coding solution in Python later?

FWIW, this proposal is from my other issue about problems with Python
date/time in separate tracker on Google Code [2].

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue7582    [patch] diff.py to use iso timestamp
[2] http://code.google.com/p/rainforce/issues/detail?id=10    python:
date/time is a mess
-- 
anatoly t.