[Datetime-SIG] Allow numerical arguments for timezones

[Franklin? Lee]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 8:40 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>> but anyway, the OP WANTS a fixed-offset -- NOT a region, politically driven
>> timezone -- there should be a way to get that easily -- the only issue is
>> whether explicitly creating a timezone object with a timedelta object s easy
>> enough.
>
> I can't think of any real-world use-cases for an actual fixed-offset
> timezone. Usually these are either fake (like when you parse an RFC822
> time), or incorrect (when you're trying to represent "local time" in
> any way - although it might happen to mostly work in places without
> DST). OP, can you explain more of what you're needing?

I'm thinking about throwaway code, not robust applications that really
need to know about DST and political changes.. I'm also thinking about
use at a lower level of expertise: people learning Python, playing
around with it, etc. Quick-and-dirty scripting.

I might also want to keep certain kinds of logs in fixed-time offsets,
for a compromise between ease of mental processing and ease of
comparison.

I think I was working on parsing timestamps from a game server which
does NOT properly handle DST. The server location and my target
timezone are usually a fixed time apart, so I could've used a
timedelta, but I thought it made more sense to express it as a
difference of timezones.