This is what's keeping me from going further. I did run the test suite against the latest version with no problem. I think making the current time module call out to a new strptime module is the wrong way to do things, especially given past practice (socket/_socket, string/strop, etc). I would prefer a time.py module be created to hold Brett's strptime function. On import, the last thing it would try doing is to import * from _time, which would obliterate Brett's Python version if the platform supports strptime().
That's only a good idea if Brett's Python code has absolutely no features beyond the C version. I'm -0 on the time.py idea -- it seems it would churn things around more than absolutely necessary. But you're right about the socket precedent. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)