In the thread "datetime module enhancements" Guido and others said that it is unpythonic to limit timestamp (seconds since Epoch) to an signed int with 32bit. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/86750 I've made a patch that introduces a new type Py_time_t as a first step to increase the size of time stamps. For now it's just an alias for time_t. typedef time_t Py_time_t; I'm proposing to change time_t in two steps: Python 2.6: Replace every occurrence of time_t by Py_time_t and give third party authors time to change their software Python 2.7 / 3000: Change Py_time_t to a signed 64bit int on all platforms and provide the necessary workaround for platforms with a 32bit time_t. Patch: http://python.org/sf/1689402 Christian