[Zope3-dev] The Date Time and TimeZone question

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:25 PM 3/16/02 -0500, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > Please check out the tz/zoneinfo library. It's the one that handles
> > timezones, and is as far as I know included in most unices today. Again, I
> > haven't read the code for this (I haven't done time zone stuff under unix)
> > so I don't know how useful it is, but it seems weird to have a library that
> > specifies timezone information back to 19th century if the API's doesn't
> > support using it.
> > Still, weirder things been known to happen. :-)
>
>I have no desire to couple Python's standard datetime implementation
>to a 3rd party library.  Nor does Zope, I'm sure.

For what it's worth, Ty and I are committed to producing a module that lets 
you read tzinfo objects a "tzcode"-format "zoneinfo database", and keeping 
a current "zoneinfo database" compiled from the "tzcode" package (which is 
updated pretty regularly by some people who care about timezone details a 
*lot* more than Ty and I!).

Anyway, if we're going to have to do that for ourselves, I'm sure that 
other people will find both the code and the database useful.  Note that 
the database format is platform independent, and our code will be 100% 
Python, so I'm not sure whether this counts as "coupling to a 3rd party 
library".  :)

I imagine, however, that the database itself is probably inappropriate for 
inclusion in the Python standard distribution; it's 120K in .tar.gz format, 
and 750k in .tar format, so it takes a fair amount of disk space for such a 
specialty item.  Zope, on, the other hand, as a "batteries included"-type 
distribution, might want to include it for standardization's sake, perhaps 
as a "zoneinfo service".