[Python-Dev] Make _strptime only time.strptime implementation?

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
>> Nobody has even cut a little gas yet, so I'd proceed under the
>> assumption that nobody will, and that the disable HAVE_STRTIME
>> code will be physically deleted.

[Kevin Jacobs]
> Actually, I did, and on python-dev.

Sorry, I meant since 2.3b1 was released.  It's the purpose of pre-releases
to find problems, and the whineometer gets reset when a new pre-release goes
out.

> strptime did not roundtrip correctly with mktime on Linux.

It was my understanding (possibly wrong, and please correct me if it is)
that Brett fixed this.

> This made my application very unhappy, so I removed all calls to
> strptime.  Right now I don't have a vested interest in shooting
> holes in the Python strptime, but I can't say I feel any warm
> fuzzies aboutit.  It seems hard to imagine that others will not run
> into similar problems, regardless of the lack of specification for
> exactly how strptime aught to work.

The primary problem isn't the lack of a crisp spec, although that's the root
cause of the real problem:  the problem is that how strptime behaves varies
in fact across boxes.  I don't expect anyone could have felt warm fuzzies
about that either, although someone could fool themself into hoping that the
platform strptime behavior they happened to get was the only behavior their
app would ever see.  With a single implementation of strptime across
platforms, that pleasant fantasy gets close to becoming the truth.  Python
is supposed to be a *little* less platform-dependent than C <wink>.