On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 04:28:48PM -0700, Chris Barker wrote:
> The only other thing I found > really weird about datetime is how Python 2 had no implementation of > a UTC tzinfo class, despite this being utterly trivial -
Huh? it is either so trivial that there is no point -- simiply say that your datetimes are UTC, and you are done. Or it's not the least bit trivial -- the only difference between a UTC datetime and a "naive" datetime is that one can be converted to (or interact with) other time zones. Except that, as we know from this conversation, is very, very non-trivial!
No, it has nothing to do with conversions. The difference between a naive timezone and a UTC one is that the UTC one explicitly specifies that it's UTC and not "local time" or some other assumed or unknown timezone. This can make a big difference when passing datetime objects to third-party libraries, such as database interfaces.