[Python-Dev] Status on PEP-431 Timezones

[Jon Ribbens]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 01:04:03AM -0500, Tim Peters wrote:
> [Tim]
> >> The Python docs also are quite clear about that all arithmetic within
> >> a single timezone is "naive".  That was intentional.  The _intended_
> >> way to do "aware" arithmetic was always to convert to UTC, do the
> >> arithmetic, then convert back.
> 
> [Lennart]
> > We can't explicitly implement incorrect timezone aware arithmetic and
> > then expect people to not use it.
> 
> Python didn't implement timezone-aware arithmetic at all within a
> single time zone.  Read what I wrote just above.  It implements naive
> arithmetic within a single time zone.

This usage of "time zone" is confusing. As far as I can tell, you
really mean "UTC offset". A time zone would be something like
"Europe/London", which has two different UTC offsets throughout
the year (not to mention other historical weirdnesses), whereas
arithmetic on a "timezone-aware" datetime is only going to work
so long as you don't cross any of the boundaries where the UTC
offset changes.

I agree with you about pretty much everything else about datetime,
just I find the terminology misleading. The only other thing I found
really weird about datetime is how Python 2 had no implementation of
a UTC tzinfo class, despite this being utterly trivial - but it's too
late to do anything about that now, of course.