[Python-ideas] Rename time module to "posixtime"

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Bruce Leban <bruce at leapyear.org> wrote:
> -1 to moving anything
>

I am getting a feeling that you are attacking a strawman.  Deprecating
time module in favor of posixtime is only the third part of my
proposal and I don't insist on any particular depreciation schedule.
All I want is to give users one obvious way to avoid conflict between
time and datetime.time.  Note that since datetime only defines a
handful of module level symbols, it is quite common to see from
datetime import date, datetime, time and it is quite confusing when
this conflicts with import time.

> The situation is confusing and moving things will add to that confusion for
> a significant length of time.
>
Let's be constructive.  What specifically do you find confusing?  Do
you agree with the list of confusing things that I listed in my
previous posts?

> What I would instead suggest is improving the docs. If I could look in one
> place to find any time function it would mitigate the fact that they're
> implemented in multiple places.

I think having datetime.datetime.strftime and time.strftime documented
in one place will not help anyone.  And I am not even mentioning
datetime.time.strftime which is of course not the same as
time.strftime and that for {date,datetime,time}.strftime function you
need to specify date/time object first and format last but for time
module strftime it is the other way around. Etc. etc.

I think most users will be happier not knowing about time module
strftime function.  Even better not knowing about strftime at all and
using "..".format(dt) instead.

And where in the docs would you explain the following: :-)

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> import time
>>> time.strftime("%c %z %Z", datetime.utcnow().utctimetuple())
'Wed Jun 16 15:22:15 2010 -0500 EST'

(Note utc in datetime calls and EST in time.strftime output.)