need help with timezone conversion (unexpected side effect of time.mktime ??)

[Paul Boddie]

On 9 Jun, 07:40, Ivan Velev <sir.hey... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks Paul,
>
> I have identified the "problem" - because of daylight change this
> particular timesamp was observed twice in Europe/Sofia. Here is the
> GMT-to-local-time conversion:
>
> +------------+---------------------+---------------------+
> | gmt_stamp  | gmt_time            | local_time          |
> +------------+---------------------+---------------------+
> | 1130631000 | 2005-10-30 00:10:00 | 2005-10-30 03:10:00 |
> +------------+---------------------+---------------------+
> | 1130634600 | 2005-10-30 01:10:00 | 2005-10-30 03:10:00 |
> +------------+---------------------+---------------------+
> | 1130638200 | 2005-10-30 02:10:00 | 2005-10-30 04:10:00 |
> +------------+---------------------+---------------------+
> | 1130641800 | 2005-10-30 03:10:00 | 2005-10-30 05:10:00 |
> +------------+---------------------+---------------------+

I still don't understand why the "problematic" timestamp would affect
the latter operation, though. I can see that both timestamps could be
valid depending on which time zone is supposed to be in operation -
have the dates for daylight saving (summer vs. winter) time changed in
Bulgaria in the last few years? Maybe asking for a conversion for a
date in 2004 invokes some old rules which then affect a conversion for
a date in 2005, even though that would be really bad behaviour (which
I don't see on this machine here).

> When you do local-time-to-GMT conversion you can expect any of those
> two timestamps. I missed that initially :( (I was sure that local time
> has "one hour gap" and not "one hour of overlapping time")

Well, it really isn't overlapping as such: you're in different zones,
of course. ;-)

> >  and I'd recommend the datetime module for any serious work with dates and times.
>
> Last time when I was playing with TZ conversions, I was not able to do
> anything using datetime module - it seems that one needs to define his
> own set of timezones (+ all the details) to get it working ... Am I
> wrong ? Can you show me how do accomplish the same conversion using
> datetime module ?

I think it's easiest to install one of the libraries which provides
the zone data. The first one that comes to mind is python-dateutil,
but I think there are others.

Paul