[Zope] WinNT & time zone woes

[Brian Hooper]

Hi there -

I and a colleague have been working with Zope on WinNT with MySQL/ODBC 
as the database, with generally very good success.  Zope is awesome!

However, in one particular situation we noted the following strange behavior - 

MySQL select queries were mysteriously failing with a parse error in RDB.py, 
related to not being able to parse a DATETIME field.  

After looking at DateTime.py and concluding that DateTime should be able to 
parse virtually anything ;-), we were initially very puzzled as to the cause 
of the parse error.  However, after eliminating everything else we could
think of, we finally found that it was the fact that NT was returning the
value 'Tokyo Standard Time' as the timezone for our machine - a value which
is not listed in the _zmap in DateTime - so, DateTime was failing here:

                # Current time, exp in specified timezone
                t,tz=time(),self._tzinfo._zmap[lower(arg)]

We added the mapping 'tokyo standard time':'Tokyo' to _zmap, restarted Zope,
and now everything's working fine.  However, when I looked into implementing
the same fix on my Japanese NT Server machine, I found that python's 
time.tzname gives me back 'PST' even though my machine is set for Japan's
time zone :-( .

A suggestion:

Would it be better to get the numerical time zone via time.timezone and then
convert it to some set string for each time zone, rather than rely on time.tzname?
Incidently, with the Solaris installation of Zope I have, Japan's time zone is
given as 'JST', which would also require an entry in DateTime to avoid an error
similar to the above.  _zmap is useful for parsing date strings, but should it
be used to determine the time zone when a more sure method is available?

Thoughts, anyone?

--Brian