[Zope3-dev] datetimeutil.py for the rest of us

[Stuart Bishop]

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I've just been looking through datetimeutils.py - it seems
to be propagating problems that persist to this day in Zope 2's
DateTime module

	- It attempts to parse timezone abbreviations and match them to
	  timezones. Timezone abbreviations are not unique, and thus
      it is only possible to guess. This is quite annoying to the
	  majority of Australians who live in the EST timezone all
	  year around (at UTC+10 or UTC+11 depending on if DST is in effect).
      There are probably other locale that conflict (and if their aren't
	  today, there may be tomorrow since this sort of thing is
	  decided by politicians and not computer programmers).
	  I think this is the reason why standards like ISO 8601 and
	  W3C datetime only use offsets for non UTC.

	- If an ambiguous datetime format is parsed, it assumes US format.
	  I feel that this case should instead raise an exception.
	  If US programmers insist on being able to write broken code,
	  seperate US specific methods could be made available in
	  datetimeutils.py or a seperate US centric module.
	

- --  
Stuart Bishop <stuart at stuartbishop.net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/
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