Nick Coghlan wrote:
The case for allowing a "60" value for seconds in the datetime constructor seems reasonable to me (i.e. prevent leap seconds from breaking date parsing), but I don't see the use case for delaying normalisation to a valid POSIX time.
If the constructor just converts the 60 to a zero and adds 1 minute immediately, then the chance of subtle breakages would be minimal and the current ValueError would be replaced by a far more graceful behaviour.
I think this is the best we can do and not get sucked into supporting leap seconds.
(Allowing 2400 hours just seems plain odd to me, but if it was adopted I'd suggest immediate normalisation be similarly applied in that case as well).
I'm not as concerned about this, but I've had occasions where it would have been handy. -- Eric.