[Python-Dev] datetime issues

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> [Gustavo Niemeyer]
> > Is there any reason for not having a single keyword parameter for
> > every function accepting a tzinfo instance?
> 
> Just the lack of anyone pointing it out in the module's 18-month review
> process <wink>.

Would you belive that I was.. erm.. sleeping!? :-)

> > I've noticed that some require 'tz', and others 'tzinfo'. Is it too
> > late to fix that?
> 
> Of course, although it's not too late to add synonyms.  It appears
> that the functions "with a lot of arguments" use tzinfo, and those
> with only one or two arguments tz now.  I doubt anyone would bother to
> use the tz keyword-arg name for a few-argument function (now(),
> fromtimestamp(), astimezone()), so I'd rather that those few grow a
> tzinfo synonym.  tz can be deprecated too, if you're bold.

It'd be nice to have these synonyms. I'll put it in my ever growing
todo list.

> > Also, is there any further work going on to improve the datetime
> > module?
> 
> Not that I'm aware of.  I'm not working on it anymore (other than
> keeping my out for bug reports, of which there have been blessedly
> few).
> 
> > I'm not suggesting we should mirror mx.DateTime functionalities, but
> > two features I miss from mx.DateTime is the DateFrom(), which does
> > its best to parse a given string, and the RelativeDateTime()
> > functionality.
> >
> > This has probably been raised in the past, so if that's the case, I'm
> > sorry. Marc-Andre, what's your opinion about reusing code from
> > mx.DateTime into datetime?
> >
> > Anyway, reusing code or not, I'll probably put sometime on it in the
> > future, if this looks interesting to everyone (after I finish my
> > current python pendencies, like SRE's recursivity removal).
> 
> If Guido wanted to stay out of the relatively clear <snort> time zone
> business, I can imagine his interest in trying to guess how to parse
> date and time strings.  Apart from Brett's strptime(), I believe the
> email module has some useful string->datetime code.  It may be good to
> fold such stuff in this area as Python already supports into datetime
> somehow.

Cool. I'll give it a try as well. I have a working relativedelta
implementation now. I'll polish it a little further and publish
it somewhere for tests.

Thanks!

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net