[Datetime-SIG] Add a strftime/strptime code for timezone ID

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 2:28 AM, Paul G <paul at ganssle.io> wrote:
> Does any other programming language actually support IANA zones out of the box? I feel like building in IANA zone support into the language itself is a bad idea, as I think I mentioned in my earlier post. This seems like something that is clearly best handled by third party libraries.
>

Yes, Pike does, and it's extremely convenient. Given that Python
includes the groundwork for timezone calculations in the stdlib, I
think it would be a Good Thing to have actual lookups of
"America/New_York" functional out-of-the-box too; whether that's by
actually incorporating tzdata in the stdlib or by referencing it
elsewhere, Python scripts shouldn't need to care.

I believe there was a proposal at one point to have a pip-updateable
package, but a stdlib or OS-provided fallback. If it's possible to
query the version of the OS-provided tzdata, Python could easily check
all three and use the latest one available.

ChrisA