[Python-Dev] Issue 2736: datetimes and Unix timestamps

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

I recently opened issue14908. At work, I have to do a bunch of things
with dates, times and timezones, and sometimes Unix timestamps are
also involved (largely for easy compatibility with legacy APIs). I
find the relative obscurity when converting datetimes to timestamps
rather painful; IMO it should be possible to do everything I need
straight from the datetime module objects, instead of having to
involve the time or calendar modules.

Anyway, I was pointed to issue 2736, which seems to have got a lot of
discouraged core contributors (Victor, Antoine, David and Ka-Ping, to
name just a few) up against Alexander (the datetime maintainer,
AFAIK). It seems like a fairly straightforward case of practicality
over purity: Alexander argues that there are "easy" one-liners to do
things like datetime.totimestamp(), but most other people seem to not
find them so easy. They've since been added to the documentation at
least, but I would like to see if there is consensus on python-dev
that adding a little more timestamp support to datetime objects would
make sense.

I hope this won't become another epic issue like the last time-related issue...

Cheers,

Dirkjan