Hi,
perhaps the sun burned too long on my brain today but I investigated some
options for replacing DateTime with Python's datetime module. Zope 3 uses
datetime and we all know that the DateTime implementation sucks. Especially
the timezone implementation has a bunch of problems (count the bugtracker
issues related to timezone errors).
Constraints:
We can not get rid of the DateTime class and its API for backward
compatibility reasons.
Idea:
The DateTime class remains in place and uses an instance attribute to
represent the original value of a DateTime object as instance of datetime.
Calls to the old DateTime API are proxied to corresponding calls of
the datetime API (or emulated)
Efforts so far:
I have some quick-and-dirty implementation that can construct the
datetime instance directly within the DateTime constructor and when
loading an object from the ZODB (using a custom __setstate__()
implementation...could be used for an on-the-fly migration). This seems to
work properly. For timezone related issues I am using pytz. However there
is a problem with using pytz: the timezone names supported by pytz are
sometimes different from the standard one. E.g. 'GMT+0400' is represented
in pytz as '/Etc/GMT+0400'...however that seems to be solvable.
Before digging deeper I would like to hear some opinions if this seems a
reasonable approach? Unlikely that we can achieve 100% backward
compatibility but possibly 99%....thoughts...comments?
Tnx,
Andreas