[Python-Dev] Status on PEP-431 Timezones

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:

> It turns out it's very complex to solve this when internally storing
> the time as the local time. Basically you have to normalize the time
> (ie check if daylight savings have changed) when doing arithmetic, but
> normalize is doing arithmetic, and you get infinite recursion.
>

This is not true.  Tim's analysis immortalized [1] at the end of the
datetime.py file,
shows that UTC to local mapping can be unambiguously recovered from the
local to UTC rules using a simple finite algorithm.  Tim assumes [2] that
standard (non-DST)
time offset is constant throughout the history, but this requirement can be
relaxed to offset
changing no more than once in any 48 hour period (if you generously allow
timezones
from -24 to 24 hours).

Actually, it looks like I am repeating what I wrote back in April, so I'll
stop with a
reference [3] to that post.

[1]: https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/v3.5.0b1/Lib/datetime.py#l1935
[2]: https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/v3.5.0b1/Lib/datetime.py#l1948
[3]: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2015-April/139171.html
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