[Python-Dev] Stdlib and timezones, again

[Zachary Ware]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Oct 2012 16:06:18 +0200
> Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Actually, that's not a bad idea. My original idea was to warn if it *was*
>> outdated, but since there is no way to check that, I scratched that idea.
>> But as I have pointed out several times, a database that is shipped with
>> Python is almost guaranteed to be outdated, so yeah, we could just warn
>> *all the time*. :-)
>>
>> I like this idea. It gives an incentive to update: Get rid of the annoying
>> warning.
>
> Well, no, it is just silly. If we ship a database, that's because we
> think it is good enough. A warning is just a nuisance here. We don't
> display warnings when the installed Python version is too old.
>

My thought was that it's better to have *something* always available,
that has a decent chance of being "good enough" in a lot of cases (and
if it's good enough for you, just silence the warning), than to
noisily fail because we can't provide a perfect solution due to
political idiocy.  Or worse, to *silently* be wrong because someone
assumed we had provided a perfect solution without looking too hard. I
had no idea the Olson database was updated so often until Dirkjan
posted about there being 21 updates in 2009 alone.

For most of my uses, I would probably be a warning-silencer.  And that
wouldn't bother me; I would actually appreciate being reminded now and
then that things may have changed since the last time I did something
with timezones, and that I need to be careful of such changes.  But,
of course, that's just me, and it was my idea anyway ;)