[issue7229] Manual entry for time.daylight can be misleading
Tomas Kubes mr_napik@centrum.cz added the comment:
why do you think someone reading about
time.daylight actually wants to "check if DST is currently active"?
If you are not familiar with the cryptic names of POSIX but live in normal world, time.daylight sounds like a quite probable place where to check if the daylight savings are active. That's why I think the help text should explicitely note it has other meaning.
You should try to think like a person that does not have any background knowledge of underlying libraries but just looks through the time library trying to solve the question - how can I check if my machine uses daylight savings now.
Regards Tomas
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Alexander Belopolsky belopolsky@users.sourceforge.net added the comment:
On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Tomas Kubes report@bugs.python.org wrote: ..
You should try to think like a person that does not have any background knowledge of underlying libraries but just looks through the time library trying to solve the question - how can I check if my machine uses daylight savings now.
I think you are confusing the purposes of a reference manual with that of a tutorial or an FAQ collection.
I will keep this issue open, however, in case someone will come up with a patch that does not introduce factual mistakes. As I suggested, the place to present details about tzname, timezone, altzone and daylight variables is the section on time.tzset(). It is currently devoted to a rather useless discussion of the TZ environment variable syntax. Instead, it should describe these variables and list the functions whose behavior depends on the value of TZ (time.localtime(), time.ctime(), time.mktime() and time.strftime()).
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participants (2)
-
Alexander Belopolsky -
Tomas Kubes