[DB-SIG] date/time handling

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Hello all,

trying to improve date/time handling in PyGreSQL we stumbled over the 
following questions:

1) Should mx.DateTime still be preferred over stdlib datetime (if both 
are available)? Or should we handle it the other way around meanwhile?

2) We want to provide a possibility to explicitly choose the preferred 
date/time type, i.e. mx.DateTime or stdlib datetime or even Ticks or 
Python tuples, or strings.

The mx.odbc module does this via an attribute "datetimeformat" of the 
connection object that can be set to constant values named 
DATETIME_DATETIMEFORMAT or STRING_DATETIMEFORMAT (unfortunately, the 
former means mx.DateTime in this context, and there is no value defined 
for stdlib datetime).

Do you think this is a good idea? Maybe we can agree on a preliminary 
standard that can be proposed for a future DB-API 3 (btw, is there any 
work in progress to create such a new version)?

-- Christoph