Greetings,

Last year at the Language Summit, I proposed to add additional concrete time zones to the standard library ( https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2019/05/paul-ganssle-time-zones-in-standard.html ). After much work and much more procrastination, I now have now put together my first proposal: support for the IANA time zone database (also called tz, zoneinfo or the Olson database). I have submitted this for consideration as PEP 615 ( https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0615/ ), and I have created a discussion thread for the PEP on the discourse forum ( https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-615-support-for-the-iana-time-zone-database-in-the-standard-library/3468 ).

Please give it a read and provide your constructive criticism. I have documented my reasoning for most of the design decisions, but I am very interested in getting feedback on the choices I’ve made here. I have marked two sections as “Open issues”, as they are the ones I feel most uncertain about, but all parts of it are up for discussion.

For the purposes of centralizing discussion, please direct comments to the discourse thread.

Links for easy access:

Discussion: https://discuss.python.org/t/3468
PEP: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0615/
Reference Implementation: https://github.com/pganssle/zoneinfo
tzdata repo: https://github.com/pganssle/tzdata

(Note: At some point I plan to move the tzdata repo to github.com/python/tzdata; if the reference implementation turns into a backport that will likely also move to an org as well).

Thanks for your consideration!

Paul