[Python-Dev] Stdlib and timezones, again

[Serhiy Storchaka]

On 30.09.12 22:51, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> Well, no, this isn't similar. Choosing one's timezone policies is a
> contemporary political decision, while choosing a language and its
> alphabet is not really a decision people ever make (it's just an aspect
> of a society's long-term evolution) - except Atatürk, perhaps :-)

Oh, no. Choosing of alphabet (and sometimes language) is also a 
contemporary political decision. For the last 25 years new letter Ґ has 
been added to the Ukrainian alphabet, and the letter Ь changed its place 
in the alphabet. There were at least 4 family of absolutely different 
character sets for Ukrainian (not counting the Unicode), some of them 
contains several incompatible variants. In several neighboring countries 
the alphabet was changed completely (from Cyrillic-based to Latin). Why 
ASCII is not enough for all?

> Furthermore, the proposal I'm making does *not* disadvantage residents
> of Russia and Ukraine: whether our Windows installer provides a database
> or not, they have to download a new database if they want up-to-date
> information. And they have to download it afresh every few months, if
> I'm following you.

Who will update the database? The developer which distributes the 
application with embedded Python can forget about the tz updates, as 
well as about non-ascii encodings. Native Unicode support in Python 
makes the second error less likely.

Why not use the system data which are updated by the OS? I know that 
Windows also changes the clock for local DST.