On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 8:09 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:

The reason that timezone() takes a timedelta is to avoid mistakes in the units.

That was more or less the original reasoning. Note that an early prototype required the offset to be specified in minutes. [1] I don't expect people to have to construct timezone objects "by hand". You would normally get tzinfo populated with a local timezone by calling .astimezone() on a UTC instance:

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from datetime import * dt = datetime.now(timezone.utc) print(dt.astimezone()) 2015-12-10 20:19:34.446688-05:00

[1]: http://bugs.python.org/issue5094#msg106911