[Python-Dev] Issue 2736: datetimes and Unix timestamps

[Walter Dörwald]

On 04.06.12 13:19, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:

> I recently opened issue14908. At work, I have to do a bunch of things
> with dates, times and timezones, and sometimes Unix timestamps are
> also involved (largely for easy compatibility with legacy APIs). I
> find the relative obscurity when converting datetimes to timestamps
> rather painful; IMO it should be possible to do everything I need
> straight from the datetime module objects, instead of having to
> involve the time or calendar modules.
>
> Anyway, I was pointed to issue 2736, which seems to have got a lot of
> discouraged core contributors (Victor, Antoine, David and Ka-Ping, to
> name just a few) up against Alexander (the datetime maintainer,
> AFAIK).

Also see: http://bugs.python.org/issue665194 (datetime-RFC2822 
roundtripping)

> It seems like a fairly straightforward case of practicality
> over purity: Alexander argues that there are "easy" one-liners to do
> things like datetime.totimestamp(),

I don't want one-liners, I want one-callers! ;)

> but most other people seem to not
> find them so easy. They've since been added to the documentation at
> least, but I would like to see if there is consensus on python-dev
> that adding a little more timestamp support to datetime objects would
> make sense.

Servus,
    Walter