Hey again Lennart,
OK, I'm just going after my old notes here, and they could be wrong. It could be that these types of timezones doesn't work in a datetime string?
Maybe. If there's a problem with parsing, I'll be happy to fix that.
The important part is that there is some sort of way to tell the module what the local timezone is, so that you can test conversions.
Just use the POSIX-defined TZ variable, and the gettz() method to retrieve the timezone.
from dateutil.tz import gettz
os.environ["TZ"] = "Brazil/East" gettz() tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/Brazil/East')
os.environ["TZ"] = "US/Eastern" gettz() tzfile('/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern')
(...)
But it makes it impossible without actually modifying the modules code somehow, and in my book, it is reasonable to call that impossible.
Just use gettz(), as explained above. You'll get a richer source of information for free.
Of course nothing is impossible in computing. (...) If I monkey-patch the module for testing, then am I really testing what goes on in production?
These are interesting statements. I won't move into discussing them because it won't benefit the main point. If you'd enjoy some general conceptual discussion we can do so privately. -- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net