[Python-ideas] Date/time literals

[Mark Dickinson]

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 9:28 AM, Masklinn <masklinn at masklinn.net> wrote:
>
> datetime does have a bunch of issues and limitations which I believe soon
> become harmful when doing serious date/calendaring works (which I don't
> claim to do, but I've seen colleagues in serious trouble due to both
> personal lack of knowledge in the field and issues with datetime itself):
> it only supports a gregoriany calendar for instance, it's horrendous
> in dealing with timezones, some methods are pretty much broken,
> constructor refuses "24" as an hour value, blows up on positive leap
> seconds)…

Are there tracker issues open for all these problems?  It not, please
would you consider opening some?  The datetime module has recently
been getting a lot more attention than it used to, thanks largely to
the efforts of Alexander Belopolsky, so I think opening relevant
tracker issues would be worthwhile.

Some of the issues you mention look like easy fixes (e.g., allowing
positive leap seconds, allowing '24:00:00' as a valid time).  The API
problems for timezones look a little bit more serious.

What are the use-cases for non-Gregorian calendars, and why do you
think the datetime module should support them?  This seems like a
specialist need to me.

And which methods are 'pretty much broken'?

If you want to see progress on these issues, please do open some
bugtracker issues.  Or if open issues already exist, it might be worth
pinging them.

Mark