On 16/09/2012 16:54, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:40 AM, <pandora.ko...@gmail.com> wrote:
Cant it be written more easily as:
date = (datetime.datetime.utcnow(+2)
i know this is not thhe correct syntax but it just needs a way to add GMT+2
hours since utc=gmt
I've dithered about whether to open this can of worms or let sleeping
dogs lie, and I finally decided to make some metaphor potpourri.
Simple UTC offsets are not the same thing as local time. There are a
variety of other considerations, but the main one is Daylight Robbery
Time, where every government wants to put its own stamp on things by
fiddling with the DST rules a bit. Most places will move their clocks
an hour forward for summer and then back for winter. But!
* Some places are sensible and don't have DST at all (eg
Australia/Queensland, America/Arizona)
* Northern hemisphere summer corresponds to southern hemisphere
winter, and vice versa
* Everyone has a different way of defining the boundaries of summer and winter
* And just to confuse us all, Irish Standard Time is used in summer,
and they *subtract* an hour for winter time!
The only way to handle timezones correctly and keep yourself even
marginally sane is to hand the job on to somebody else. I dodged the
whole issue by letting our Postgres database handle everything for us
(date/time formats, timezones, the lot), and having our internal
systems all just work in UTC. You'll likely find it easiest to do the
same thing with a Python library.
Just don't try to pretend to yourself that Greece uses GMT+2, because
it's not that simple. For one thing, it's currently summer there...
ChrisA
I guess that Double British Summer Time made things twice as difficult?
--
Cheers.
Mark Lawrence.
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