[Python-Dev] tzset

[Guido van Rossum]

> If this thing is so broken, why are we bothering with it?  It's one thing
> to want to give people access to facilities that do something useful; it's
> another thing entirely to give them access to something that is broken.
> 
> Perhaps if we are going to bother to make this available the work should
> be done to make it have more standard output?  So take whatever the C
> function returns and then make it conform to some reasonable output.

I look at it differently.  It's useful to make the platform tzset()
available, because it lets us do something that couldn't be done
before: change the definition of local time without restarting Python.
If tzset() doesn't take standardized arguments, that's the problem of
whoever wants to use it.  There are lots of functions that have this:
for example, anything taking a filename.  At least it's there.

The test suite for tzset() probably is too strict; we'll tune it to
avoid failures on common platforms during the beta cycle.

I don't know if it makes sense to provide tzset() on Windows; from
Tim's description it doesn't sound likely.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)