On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Zachary Ware <zachary.ware+pydev@gmail.com> wrote:

Re: to bundle or not to bundle

What about having an included database that issues a (silence-able) warning any time it is used/imported/etc.? Have it say something to the effect of "Warning, the Olson database included with Python is likely to be outdated, please see <webpage> for information" where <webpage> (which may just be the doc page for the module) spells out why it's outdated, why it's not possible for it to be kept up to date, that this version may still work for you depending on application and how to silence the warning, and how to get the latest version via pypi or otherwise.

As far as preference of database, I would think the best route would be to provide the ability to set the order you want to look in, with the default being:
1) user specified source (usually not one of the below)
2) updated tzdb from pypi
3) OS's tzdb
4) included tzdb (with warning)

My $0.02USD, for what they're worth :)

Actually, that's not a bad idea. My original idea was to warn if it *was* outdated, but since there is no way to check that, I scratched that idea. But as I have pointed out several times, a database that is shipped with Python is almost guaranteed to be outdated, so yeah, we could just warn *all the time*. :-) 

I like this idea. It gives an incentive to update: Get rid of the annoying warning. It also will be silent on Unix, as we'll use the OS database, so this will only happen on Windows or if you embed Python or similar.

//Lennart