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Python Enhancement Proposals

PEP 615 – Support for the IANA Time Zone Database in the Standard Library

Author:
Paul Ganssle <paul at ganssle.io>
Discussions-To:
Discourse thread
Status:
Final
Type:
Standards Track
Created:
22-Feb-2020
Python-Version:
3.9
Post-History:
25-Feb-2020, 29-Mar-2020
Replaces:
431

Table of Contents

Important

This PEP is a historical document. The up-to-date, canonical documentation can now be found at zoneinfo.

×

See PEP 1 for how to propose changes.

Abstract

This proposes adding a module, zoneinfo, to provide a concrete time zone implementation supporting the IANA time zone database. By default, zoneinfo will use the system’s time zone data if available; if no system time zone data is available, the library will fall back to using the first-party package tzdata, deployed on PyPI. [d]

Motivation

The datetime library uses a flexible mechanism to handle time zones: all conversions and time zone information queries are delegated to an instance of a subclass of the abstract datetime.tzinfo base class. [10] This allows users to implement arbitrarily complex time zone rules, but in practice the majority of users want support for just three types of time zone: [a]

  1. UTC and fixed offsets thereof
  2. The system local time zone
  3. IANA time zones

In Python 3.2, the datetime.timezone class was introduced to support the first class of time zone (with a special datetime.timezone.utc singleton for UTC).

While there is still no “local” time zone, in Python 3.0 the semantics of naïve time zones was changed to support many “local time” operations, and it is now possible to get a fixed time zone offset from a local time:

>>> print(datetime(2020, 2, 22, 12, 0).astimezone())
2020-02-22 12:00:00-05:00
>>> print(datetime(2020, 2, 22, 12, 0).astimezone()
...       .strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %Z"))
2020-02-22 12:00:00 EST
>>> print(datetime(2020, 2, 22, 12, 0).astimezone(timezone.utc))
2020-02-22 17:00:00+00:00

However, there is still no support for the time zones described in the IANA time zone database (also called the “tz” database or the Olson database [6]). The time zone database is in the public domain and is widely distributed — it is present by default on many Unix-like operating systems. Great care goes into the stability of the database: there are IETF RFCs both for the maintenance procedures (RFC 6557) and for the compiled binary (TZif) format (RFC 8536). As such, it is likely that adding support for the compiled outputs of the IANA database will add great value to end users even with the relatively long cadence of standard library releases.

Proposal

This PEP has three main concerns:

  1. The semantics of the zoneinfo.ZoneInfo class (zoneinfo-class)
  2. Time zone data sources used (data-sources)
  3. Options for configuration of the time zone search path (search-path-config)

Because of the complexity of the proposal, rather than having separate “specification” and “rationale” sections the design decisions and rationales are grouped together by subject.

The zoneinfo.ZoneInfo class

Constructors

The initial design of the zoneinfo.ZoneInfo class has several constructors.

ZoneInfo(key: str)

The primary constructor takes a single argument, key, which is a string indicating the name of a zone file in the system time zone database (e.g. "America/New_York", "Europe/London"), and returns a ZoneInfo constructed from the first matching data source on search path (see the data-sources section for more details). All zone information must be eagerly read from the data source (usually a TZif file) upon construction, and may not change during the lifetime of the object (this restriction applies to all ZoneInfo constructors).

In the event that no matching file is found on the search path (either because the system does not supply time zone data or because the key is invalid), the constructor will raise a zoneinfo.ZoneInfoNotFoundError, which will be a subclass of KeyError.

One somewhat unusual guarantee made by this constructor is that calls with identical arguments must return identical objects. Specifically, for all values of key, the following assertion must always be valid [b]:

a = ZoneInfo(key)
b = ZoneInfo(key)
assert a is b

The reason for this comes from the fact that the semantics of datetime operations (e.g. comparison, arithmetic) depend on whether the datetimes involved represent the same or different zones; two datetimes are in the same zone only if dt1.tzinfo is dt2.tzinfo. [1] In addition to the modest performance benefit from avoiding unnecessary proliferation of ZoneInfo objects, providing this guarantee should minimize surprising behavior for end users.

dateutil.tz.gettz has provided a similar guarantee since version 2.7.0 (release March 2018). [16]

Note

The implementation may decide how to implement the cache behavior, but the guarantee made here only requires that as long as two references exist to the result of identical constructor calls, they must be references to the same object. This is consistent with a reference counted cache where ZoneInfo objects are ejected when no references to them exist (for example, a cache implemented with a weakref.WeakValueDictionary) — it is allowed but not required or recommended to implement this with a “strong” cache, where all ZoneInfo objects are kept alive indefinitely.

ZoneInfo.no_cache(key: str)

This is an alternate constructor that bypasses the constructor’s cache. It is identical to the primary constructor, but returns a new object on each call. This is likely most useful for testing purposes, or to deliberately induce “different zone” semantics between datetimes with the same nominal time zone.

Even if an object constructed by this method would have been a cache miss, it must not be entered into the cache; in other words, the following assertion should always be true:

>>> a = ZoneInfo.no_cache(key)
>>> b = ZoneInfo(key)
>>> a is not b
ZoneInfo.from_file(fobj: IO[bytes], /, key: str = None)

This is an alternate constructor that allows the construction of a ZoneInfo object from any TZif byte stream. This constructor takes an optional parameter, key, which sets the name of the zone, for the purposes of __str__ and __repr__ (see Representations).

Unlike the primary constructor, this always constructs a new object. There are two reasons that this deviates from the primary constructor’s caching behavior: stream objects have mutable state and so determining whether two inputs are identical is difficult or impossible, and it is likely that users constructing from a file specifically want to load from that file and not a cache.

As with ZoneInfo.no_cache, objects constructed by this method must not be added to the cache.

Behavior during data updates

It is important that a given ZoneInfo object’s behavior not change during its lifetime, because a datetime’s utcoffset() method is used in both its equality and hash calculations, and if the result were to change during the datetime’s lifetime, it could break the invariant for all hashable objects [3] [4] that if x == y, it must also be true that hash(x) == hash(y) [c] .

Considering both the preservation of datetime’s invariants and the primary constructor’s contract to always return the same object when called with identical arguments, if a source of time zone data is updated during a run of the interpreter, it must not invalidate any caches or modify any existing ZoneInfo objects. Newly constructed ZoneInfo objects, however, should come from the updated data source.

This means that the point at which the data source is updated for new invocations of the ZoneInfo constructor depends primarily on the semantics of the caching behavior. The only guaranteed way to get a ZoneInfo object from an updated data source is to induce a cache miss, either by bypassing the cache and using ZoneInfo.no_cache or by clearing the cache.

Note

The specified cache behavior does not require that the cache be lazily populated — it is consistent with the specification (though not recommended) to eagerly pre-populate the cache with time zones that have never been constructed.

Deliberate cache invalidation

In addition to ZoneInfo.no_cache, which allows a user to bypass the cache, ZoneInfo also exposes a clear_cache method to deliberately invalidate either the entire cache or selective portions of the cache:

ZoneInfo.clear_cache(*, only_keys: Iterable[str]=None) -> None

If no arguments are passed, all caches are invalidated and the first call for each key to the primary ZoneInfo constructor after the cache has been cleared will return a new instance.

>>> NYC0 = ZoneInfo("America/New_York")
>>> NYC0 is ZoneInfo("America/New_York")
True
>>> ZoneInfo.clear_cache()
>>> NYC1 = ZoneInfo("America/New_York")
>>> NYC0 is NYC1
False
>>> NYC1 is ZoneInfo("America/New_York")
True

An optional parameter, only_keys, takes an iterable of keys to clear from the cache, otherwise leaving the cache intact.

>>> NYC0 = ZoneInfo("America/New_York")
>>> LA0 = ZoneInfo("America/Los_Angeles")
>>> ZoneInfo.clear_cache(only_keys=["America/New_York"])
>>> NYC1 = ZoneInfo("America/New_York")
>>> LA0 = ZoneInfo("America/Los_Angeles")
>>> NYC0 is NYC1
False
>>> LA0 is LA1
True

Manipulation of the cache behavior is expected to be a niche use case; this function is primarily provided to facilitate testing, and to allow users with unusual requirements to tune the cache invalidation behavior to their needs.

String representation

The ZoneInfo class’s __str__ representation will be drawn from the key parameter. This is partially because the key represents a human-readable “name” of the string, but also because it is a useful parameter that users will want exposed. It is necessary to provide a mechanism to expose the key for serialization between languages and because it is also a primary key for localization projects like CLDR (the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository [5]).

An example:

>>> zone = ZoneInfo("Pacific/Kwajalein")
>>> str(zone)
'Pacific/Kwajalein'

>>> dt = datetime(2020, 4, 1, 3, 15, tzinfo=zone)
>>> f"{dt.isoformat()} [{dt.tzinfo}]"
'2020-04-01T03:15:00+12:00 [Pacific/Kwajalein]'

When a key is not specified, the str operation should not fail, but should return the objects’s __repr__:

>>> zone = ZoneInfo.from_file(f)
>>> str(zone)
'ZoneInfo.from_file(<_io.BytesIO object at ...>)'

The __repr__ for a ZoneInfo is implementation-defined and not necessarily stable between versions, but it must not be a valid ZoneInfo key, to avoid confusion between a key-derived ZoneInfo with a valid __str__ and a file-derived ZoneInfo which has fallen through to the __repr__.

Since the use of str() to access the key provides no easy way to check for the presence of a key (the only way is to try constructing a ZoneInfo from it and detect whether it raises an exception), ZoneInfo objects will also expose a read-only key attribute, which will be None in the event that no key was supplied.

Pickle serialization

Rather than serializing all transition data, ZoneInfo objects will be serialized by key, and ZoneInfo objects constructed from raw files (even those with a value for key specified) cannot be pickled.

The behavior of a ZoneInfo object depends on how it was constructed:

  1. ZoneInfo(key): When constructed with the primary constructor, a ZoneInfo object will be serialized by key, and when deserialized the will use the primary constructor in the deserializing process, and thus be expected to be the same object as other references to the same time zone. For example, if europe_berlin_pkl is a string containing a pickle constructed from ZoneInfo("Europe/Berlin"), one would expect the following behavior:
    >>> a = ZoneInfo("Europe/Berlin")
    >>> b = pickle.loads(europe_berlin_pkl)
    >>> a is b
    True
    
  2. ZoneInfo.no_cache(key): When constructed from the cache-bypassing constructor, the ZoneInfo object will still be serialized by key, but when deserialized, it will use the cache bypassing constructor. If europe_berlin_pkl_nc is a string containing a pickle constructed from ZoneInfo.no_cache("Europe/Berlin"), one would expect the following behavior:
    >>> a = ZoneInfo("Europe/Berlin")
    >>> b = pickle.loads(europe_berlin_pkl_nc)
    >>> a is b
    False
    
  3. ZoneInfo.from_file(fobj, /, key=None): When constructed from a file, the ZoneInfo object will raise an exception on pickling. If an end user wants to pickle a ZoneInfo constructed from a file, it is recommended that they use a wrapper type or a custom serialization function: either serializing by key or storing the contents of the file object and serializing that.

This method of serialization requires that the time zone data for the required key be available on both the serializing and deserializing side, similar to the way that references to classes and functions are expected to exist in both the serializing and deserializing environments. It also means that no guarantees are made about the consistency of results when unpickling a ZoneInfo pickled in an environment with a different version of the time zone data.

Sources for time zone data

One of the hardest challenges for IANA time zone support is keeping the data up to date; between 1997 and 2020, there have been between 3 and 21 releases per year, often in response to changes in time zone rules with little to no notice (see [7] for more details). In order to keep up to date, and to give the system administrator control over the data source, we propose to use system-deployed time zone data wherever possible. However, not all systems ship a publicly accessible time zone database — notably Windows uses a different system for managing time zones — and so if available zoneinfo falls back to an installable first-party package, tzdata, available on PyPI. [d] If no system zoneinfo files are found but tzdata is installed, the primary ZoneInfo constructor will use tzdata as the time zone source.

System time zone information

Many Unix-like systems deploy time zone data by default, or provide a canonical time zone data package (often called tzdata, as it is on Arch Linux, Fedora, and Debian). Whenever possible, it would be preferable to defer to the system time zone information, because this allows time zone information for all language stacks to be updated and maintained in one place. Python distributors are encouraged to ensure that time zone data is installed alongside Python whenever possible (e.g. by declaring tzdata as a dependency for the python package).

The zoneinfo module will use a “search path” strategy analogous to the PATH environment variable or the sys.path variable in Python; the zoneinfo.TZPATH variable will be read-only (see search-path-config for more details), ordered list of time zone data locations to search. When creating a ZoneInfo instance from a key, the zone file will be constructed from the first data source on the path in which the key exists, so for example, if TZPATH were:

TZPATH = (
    "/usr/share/zoneinfo",
    "/etc/zoneinfo"
    )

and (although this would be very unusual) /usr/share/zoneinfo contained only America/New_York and /etc/zoneinfo contained both America/New_York and Europe/Moscow, then ZoneInfo("America/New_York") would be satisfied by /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/New_York, while ZoneInfo("Europe/Moscow") would be satisfied by /etc/zoneinfo/Europe/Moscow.

At the moment, on Windows systems, the search path will default to empty, because Windows does not officially ship a copy of the time zone database. On non-Windows systems, the search path will default to a list of the most commonly observed search paths. Although this is subject to change in future versions, at launch the default search path will be:

TZPATH = (
    "/usr/share/zoneinfo",
    "/usr/lib/zoneinfo",
    "/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo",
    "/etc/zoneinfo",
)

This may be configured both at compile time or at runtime; more information on configuration options at search-path-config.

The tzdata Python package

In order to ensure easy access to time zone data for all end users, this PEP proposes to create a data-only package tzdata as a fallback for when system data is not available. The tzdata package would be distributed on PyPI as a “first party” package [d], maintained by the CPython development team.

The tzdata package contains only data and metadata, with no public-facing functions or classes. It will be designed to be compatible with both newer importlib.resources [11] access patterns and older access patterns like pkgutil.get_data [12] .

While it is designed explicitly for the use of CPython, the tzdata package is intended as a public package in its own right, and it may be used as an “official” source of time zone data for third party Python packages.

Search path configuration

The time zone search path is very system-dependent, and sometimes even application-dependent, and as such it makes sense to provide options to customize it. This PEP provides for three such avenues for customization:

  1. Global configuration via a compile-time option
  2. Per-run configuration via environment variables
  3. Runtime configuration change via a reset_tzpath function

In all methods of configuration, the search path must consist of only absolute, rather than relative paths. Implementations may choose to ignore, warn or raise an exception if a string other than an absolute path is found (and may make different choices depending on the context — e.g. raising an exception when an invalid path is passed to reset_tzpath but warning when one is included in the environment variable). If an exception is not raised, any strings other than an absolute path must not be included in the time zone search path.

Compile-time options

It is most likely that downstream distributors will know exactly where their system time zone data is deployed, and so a compile-time option PYTHONTZPATH will be provided to set the default search path.

The PYTHONTZPATH option should be a string delimited by os.pathsep, listing possible locations for the time zone data to be deployed (e.g. /usr/share/zoneinfo).

Environment variables

When initializing TZPATH (and whenever reset_tzpath is called with no arguments), the zoneinfo module will use the environment variable PYTHONTZPATH, if it exists, to set the search path.

PYTHONTZPATH is an os.pathsep-delimited string which replaces (rather than augments) the default time zone path. Some examples of the proposed semantics:

$ python print_tzpath.py
("/usr/share/zoneinfo",
 "/usr/lib/zoneinfo",
 "/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo",
 "/etc/zoneinfo")

$ PYTHONTZPATH="/etc/zoneinfo:/usr/share/zoneinfo" python print_tzpath.py
("/etc/zoneinfo",
 "/usr/share/zoneinfo")

$ PYTHONTZPATH="" python print_tzpath.py
()

This provides no built-in mechanism for prepending or appending to the default search path, as these use cases are likely to be somewhat more niche. It should be possible to populate an environment variable with the default search path fairly easily:

$ export DEFAULT_TZPATH=$(python -c \
    "import os, zoneinfo; print(os.pathsep.join(zoneinfo.TZPATH))")

reset_tzpath function

zoneinfo provides a reset_tzpath function that allows for changing the search path at runtime.

def reset_tzpath(
    to: Optional[Sequence[Union[str, os.PathLike]]] = None
) -> None:
    ...

When called with a sequence of paths, this function sets zoneinfo.TZPATH to a tuple constructed from the desired value. When called with no arguments or None, this function resets zoneinfo.TZPATH to the default configuration.

This is likely to be primarily useful for (permanently or temporarily) disabling the use of system time zone paths and forcing the module to use the tzdata package. It is not likely that reset_tzpath will be a common operation, save perhaps in test functions sensitive to time zone configuration, but it seems preferable to provide an official mechanism for changing this rather than allowing a proliferation of hacks around the immutability of TZPATH.

Caution

Although changing TZPATH during a run is a supported operation, users should be advised that doing so may occasionally lead to unusual semantics, and when making design trade-offs greater weight will be afforded to using a static TZPATH, which is the much more common use case.

As noted in Constructors, the primary ZoneInfo constructor employs a cache to ensure that two identically-constructed ZoneInfo objects always compare as identical (i.e. ZoneInfo(key) is ZoneInfo(key)), and the nature of this cache is implementation-defined. This means that the behavior of the ZoneInfo constructor may be unpredictably inconsistent in some situations when used with the same key under different values of TZPATH. For example:

>>> reset_tzpath(to=["/my/custom/tzdb"])
>>> a = ZoneInfo("My/Custom/Zone")
>>> reset_tzpath()
>>> b = ZoneInfo("My/Custom/Zone")
>>> del a
>>> del b
>>> c = ZoneInfo("My/Custom/Zone")

In this example, My/Custom/Zone exists only in the /my/custom/tzdb and not on the default search path. In all implementations the constructor for a must succeed. It is implementation-defined whether the constructor for b succeeds, but if it does, it must be true that a is b, because both a and b are references to the same key. It is also implementation-defined whether the constructor for c succeeds. Implementations of zoneinfo may return the object constructed in previous constructor calls, or they may fail with an exception.

Backwards Compatibility

This will have no backwards compatibility issues as it will create a new API.

With only minor modification, a backport with support for Python 3.6+ of the zoneinfo module could be created.

The tzdata package is designed to be “data only”, and should support any version of Python that it can be built for (including Python 2.7).

Security Implications

This will require parsing zoneinfo data from disk, mostly from system locations but potentially from user-supplied data. Errors in the implementation (particularly the C code) could cause potential security issues, but there is no special risk relative to parsing other file types.

Because the time zone data keys are essentially paths relative to some time zone root, implementations should take care to avoid path traversal attacks. Requesting keys such as ../../../path/to/something should not reveal anything about the state of the file system outside of the time zone path.

Reference Implementation

An initial reference implementation is available at https://github.com/pganssle/zoneinfo

This may eventually be converted into a backport for 3.6+.

Rejected Ideas

Building a custom tzdb compiler

One major concern with the use of the TZif format is that it does not actually contain enough information to always correctly determine the value to return for tzinfo.dst(). This is because for any given time zone offset, TZif only marks the UTC offset and whether or not it represents a DST offset, but tzinfo.dst() returns the total amount of the DST shift, so that the “standard” offset can be reconstructed from datetime.utcoffset() - datetime.dst(). The value to use for dst() can be determined by finding the equivalent STD offset and calculating the difference, but the TZif format does not specify which offsets form STD/DST pairs, and so heuristics must be used to determine this.

One common heuristic — looking at the most recent standard offset — notably fails in the case of the time zone changes in Portugal in 1992 and 1996, where the “standard” offset was shifted by 1 hour during a DST transition, leading to a transition from STD to DST status with no change in offset. In fact, it is possible (though it has never happened) for a time zone to be created that is permanently DST and has no standard offsets.

Although this information is missing in the compiled TZif binaries, it is present in the raw tzdb files, and it would be possible to parse this information ourselves and create a more suitable binary format.

This idea was rejected for several reasons:

  1. It precludes the use of any system-deployed time zone information, which is usually present only in TZif format.
  2. The raw tzdb format, while stable, is less stable than the TZif format; some downstream tzdb parsers have already run into problems with old deployments of their custom parsers becoming incompatible with recent tzdb releases, leading to the creation of a “rearguard” format to ease the transition. [8]
  3. Heuristics currently suffice in dateutil and pytz for all known time zones, historical and present, and it is not very likely that new time zones will appear that cannot be captured by heuristics — though it is somewhat more likely that new rules that are not captured by the current generation of heuristics will appear; in that case, bugfixes would be required to accommodate the changed situation.
  4. The dst() method’s utility (and in fact the isdst parameter in TZif) is somewhat questionable to start with, as almost all the useful information is contained in the utcoffset() and tzname() methods, which are not subject to the same problems.

In short, maintaining a custom tzdb compiler or compiled package adds maintenance burdens to both the CPython dev team and system administrators, and its main benefit is to address a hypothetical failure that would likely have minimal real world effects were it to occur.

Including tzdata in the standard library by default

Although PEP 453, which introduced the ensurepip mechanism to CPython, provides a convenient template for a standard library module maintained on PyPI, a potentially similar ensuretzdata mechanism is somewhat less necessary, and would be complicated enough that it is considered out of scope for this PEP.

Because the zoneinfo module is designed to use the system time zone data wherever possible, the tzdata package is unnecessary (and may be undesirable) on systems that deploy time zone data, and so it does not seem critical to ship tzdata with CPython.

It is also not yet clear how these hybrid standard library / PyPI modules should be updated, (other than pip, which has a natural mechanism for updates and notifications) and since it is not critical to the operation of the module, it seems prudent to defer any such proposal.

Support for leap seconds

In addition to time zone offset and name rules, the IANA time zone database also provides a source of leap second data. This is deemed out of scope because datetime.datetime currently has no support for leap seconds, and the question of leap second data can be deferred until leap second support is added.

The first-party tzdata package should ship the leap second data, even if it is not used by the zoneinfo module.

Using a pytz-like interface

A pytz-like ([18]) interface was proposed in PEP 431, but was ultimately withdrawn / rejected for lack of ambiguous datetime support. PEP 495 added the fold attribute to address this problem, but fold obviates the need for pytz’s non-standard tzinfo classes, and so a pytz-like interface is no longer necessary. [2]

The zoneinfo approach is more closely based on dateutil.tz, which implemented support for fold (including a backport to older versions) just before the release of Python 3.6.

Windows support via Microsoft’s ICU API

Windows does not ship the time zone database as TZif files, but as of Windows 10’s 2017 Creators Update, Microsoft has provided an API for interacting with the International Components for Unicode (ICU) project [13] [14] , which includes an API for accessing time zone data — sourced from the IANA time zone database. [15]

Providing bindings for this would allow us to support Windows “out of the box” without the need to install the tzdata package, but unfortunately the C headers provided by Windows do not provide any access to the underlying time zone data — only an API to query the system for transition and offset information is available. This would constrain the semantics of any ICU-based implementation in ways that may not be compatible with a non-ICU-based implementation — particularly around the behavior of the cache.

Since it seems like ICU cannot be used as simply an additional data source for ZoneInfo objects, this PEP considers the ICU support to be out of scope, and probably better supported by a third-party library.

Alternative environment variable configurations

This PEP proposes to use a single environment variable: PYTHONTZPATH. This is based on the assumption that the majority of users who would want to manipulate the time zone path would want to fully replace it (e.g. “I know exactly where my time zone data is”), and other use cases like prepending to the existing search path would be less common.

There are several other schemes that were considered and rejected:

  1. Separate PYTHON_TZPATH into two environment variables: DEFAULT_PYTHONTZPATH and PYTHONTZPATH, where PYTHONTZPATH would contain values to append (or prepend) to the default time zone path, and DEFAULT_PYTHONTZPATH would replace the default time zone path. This was rejected because it would likely lead to user confusion if the primary use case is to replace rather than augment.
  2. Adding either PYTHONTZPATH_PREPEND, PYTHONTZPATH_APPEND or both, so that users can augment the search path on either end without attempting to determine what the default time zone path is. This was rejected as likely to be unnecessary, and because it could easily be added in a backwards-compatible manner in future updates if there is much demand for such a feature.
  3. Use only the PYTHONTZPATH variable, but provide a custom special value that represents the default time zone path, e.g. <<DEFAULT_TZPATH>>, so users could append to the time zone path with, e.g. PYTHONTZPATH=<<DEFAULT_TZPATH>>:/my/path could be used to append /my/path to the end of the time zone path.

    One advantage to this scheme would be that it would add a natural extension point for specifying non-file-based elements on the search path, such as changing the priority of tzdata if it exists, or if native support for TZDIST were to be added to the library in the future.

    This was rejected mainly because these sort of special values are not usually found in PATH-like variables and the only currently proposed use case is a stand-in for the default TZPATH, which can be acquired by executing a Python program to query for the default value. An additional factor in rejecting this is that because PYTHONTZPATH accepts only absolute paths, any string that does not represent a valid absolute path is implicitly reserved for future use, so it would be possible to introduce these special values as necessary in a backwards-compatible way in future versions of the library.

Using the datetime module

One possible idea would be to add ZoneInfo to the datetime module, rather than giving it its own separate module. This PEP favors the use of a separate zoneinfo module,though a nested datetime.zoneinfo module was also under consideration.

Arguments against putting ZoneInfo directly into datetime

The datetime module is already somewhat crowded, as it has many classes with somewhat complex behavior — datetime.datetime, datetime.date, datetime.time, datetime.timedelta, datetime.timezone and datetime.tzinfo. The module’s implementation and documentation are already quite complicated, and it is probably beneficial to try to not to compound the problem if it can be helped.

The ZoneInfo class is also in some ways different from all the other classes provided by datetime; the other classes are all intended to be lean, simple data types, whereas the ZoneInfo class is more complex: it is a parser for a specific format (TZif), a representation for the information stored in that format and a mechanism to look up the information in well-known locations in the system.

Finally, while it is true that someone who needs the zoneinfo module also needs the datetime module, the reverse is not necessarily true: many people will want to use datetime without zoneinfo. Considering that zoneinfo will likely pull in additional, possibly more heavy-weight standard library modules, it would be preferable to allow the two to be imported separately — particularly if potential “tree shaking” distributions are in Python’s future. [9]

In the final analysis, it makes sense to keep zoneinfo a separate module with a separate documentation page rather than to put its classes and functions directly into datetime.

Using datetime.zoneinfo instead of zoneinfo

A more palatable configuration may be to nest zoneinfo as a module under datetime, as datetime.zoneinfo.

Arguments in favor of this:

  1. It neatly namespaces zoneinfo together with datetime
  2. The timezone class is already in datetime, and it may seem strange that some time zones are in datetime and others are in a top-level module.
  3. As mentioned earlier, importing zoneinfo necessarily requires importing datetime, so it is no imposition to require importing the parent module.

Arguments against this:

  1. In order to avoid forcing all datetime users to import zoneinfo, the zoneinfo module would need to be lazily imported, which means that end-users would need to explicitly import datetime.zoneinfo (as opposed to importing datetime and accessing the zoneinfo attribute on the module). This is the way dateutil works (all submodules are lazily imported), and it is a perennial source of confusion for end users.

    This confusing requirement from end-users can be avoided using a module-level __getattr__ and __dir__ per PEP 562, but this would add some complexity to the implementation of the datetime module. This sort of behavior in modules or classes tends to confuse static analysis tools, which may not be desirable for a library as widely used and critical as datetime.

  2. Nesting the implementation under datetime would likely require datetime to be reorganized from a single-file module (datetime.py) to a directory with an __init__.py. This is a minor concern, but the structure of the datetime module has been stable for many years, and it would be preferable to avoid churn if possible.

    This concern could be alleviated by implementing zoneinfo as _zoneinfo.py and importing it as zoneinfo from within datetime, but this does not seem desirable from an aesthetic or code organization standpoint, and it would preclude the version of nesting where end users are required to explicitly import datetime.zoneinfo.

This PEP takes the position that on balance it would be best to use a separate top-level zoneinfo module because the benefits of nesting are not so great that it overwhelms the practical implementation concerns.

Footnotes

[a]
The claim that the vast majority of users only want a few types of time zone is based on anecdotal impressions rather than anything remotely scientific. As one data point, dateutil provides many time zone types, but user support mostly focuses on these three types.
[b]
The statement that identically constructed ZoneInfo objects should be identical objects may be violated if the user deliberately clears the time zone cache.
[c]
The hash value for a given datetime is cached on first calculation, so we do not need to worry about the possibly more serious issue that a given datetime object’s hash would change during its lifetime.
[d] (1, 2, 3)
The term “first party” here is distinguished from “third party” in that, although it is distributed via PyPI and is not currently included in Python by default, it is to be considered an official sub-project of CPython rather than a “blessed” third-party package.

References

Other time zone implementations:


Source: https://github.com/python/peps/blob/main/peps/pep-0615.rst

Last modified: 2024-06-01 20:10:03 GMT