[Python-Dev] Stdlib and timezones, again

[Lennart Regebro]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> If a timezone database is bundled into the standard library, there are
> 3 clear mechanisms for encouraging the use of fresh TZ data:
>
> 1. Consider TZ database updates to be bug fixes, and thus include them
> in maintenance releases. This will keep the provided version
> reasonably fresh for Python versions that are still in maintenance
> mode.
> 2. Provide a mechanism to prefer the database from PyPI.
> 3. Provide a mechanism to prefer the OS database for platforms that
> provide an Olson compatible interface (I briefly looked into that for
> Windows a while back - it doesn't seem like a practical idea, since
> Microsoft went off and did their own thing. It works for Linux and
> other platforms that use the Olson database natively, though)
>
> Since explicit is better than implicit, I *wouldn't* want to see
> magical side affects where merely installing the database from PyPI,
> or switching from Windows to Linux caused different behaviour.
> However, it should be very easy for an application or environment to
> *explicitly request* the use of the pytz database or the OS database
> in preference to the bundled database.
>

I proposed 2 and 3, and I don't really see much magical side-effects with
those.
As mentioned we can also include a database in the standardlib, but since
that will almost always be out of date, I don't really see the point.
It is of course only an issue on Windows, but still.

//Lennart
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