On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 1:16 AM, Tim Peters
A careful application will have to call tz.utcoffset() with both values of the flag and either warn about the default choice or ask the user for an additional input.
As above, how can one programatically pick a valid default when faced with a missing time?
Suppose, on UTC time u=X, local clocks are advanced d > 0 units. Then the function L(u) that maps UTC time u to local time, can be written as L(u) = u + o + d * 1[u >= X] where o is the UTC offset before the transition and 1[] is the (Knuth?) indicator function. Let L0(u) = u + o and L1(u) = u + o + d. My proposal is that when t is between X + o and X + o + d and therefore t = L(u) has no solution, we should offer solutions to t = L0(u) and t = L1(t) instead. (These solutions are, BTW, t - o and t - o - d.) With the notation introduced so far, my "extended local-to-global function" xG(t, first=True) can be written as def xG(t, first=True): if X + o <= t < X + o + d: if first: return t - o else: return t - o - d .. # handle other times Note that xG(t, first=True) > xG(t, first=False) is the deliberate choice that makes it dead easy to detect that the returned values are not solutions of t = L(u).