I've written a simple class that implements a local timezone tzinfo object, deferring to what the time module exposes about the local zone.

https://gist.github.com/gvanrossum/ef201fe313719305c4c7

There are two variations: one for systems that support tm_gmtoff and tm_zone, one for systems without those.

Output of the test program:

BetterLocalTimeZone Fri Aug 28 15:50:22 2015 PDT (-0700) Wed Feb 24 15:50:22 2016 PST (-0800)

I'm not entirely sure why we didn't add this to the stdlib ages ago. (Maybe out of a sense of perfectionism, since time.localtime() may be wrong for dates in the past or future where different DST rules or a different standard offset apply? But why would we care, if we're fine with the time module's behavior?)