On Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 9:26 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I believe there was a proposal at one point to have a pip-updateable
> package, but a stdlib or OS-provided fallback. If it's possible to
> query the version of the OS-provided tzdata, Python could easily check
> all three and use the latest one available.


Yes, that was PEP 431, [1] but it was withdrawn after its author got stuck on the issue that was later resolved in PEP 495. [2]  With that hurdle behind, I plan to revive the proposal to include full timezone support in Python some time in the 3.7 cycle.

I started a test project [3] and similar functionality is being incorporated by Paul Ganssle in the dateutil library. [4]