[Dev] Time zones in Chandler

[jeffrey at skyhouseconsulting.com]

Hi Folks,

We will probably need a cross-platform way to deal with timezones in
Python.  Python 2.3 introduced decent timezone operation through the
datetime module, but it doesn't actually implement any concrete
timezone classes, i.e., datetime objects don't automatically know what
'PST' or 'America/Los_Angeles' means.

There's a free interface to the standard Olson timezone database available at
http://s.keim.free.fr/tz/doc.html which seems like it might work well
for us.  Does anyone see any problems in integrating this tiny (70K)
module into the Chandler build?

One potential complication is that we're currently using mxDateTime
objects for dealing with dates, and it's not clear that this package
will actually make it easier to deal with timezones in mx.  Are we
only using mx because we want mxRelativeDateTime objects, or are there
other reasons to prefer mx to datetime?

I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on what problems around time
zones might come up with Chandler.

Sincerely,
Jeffrey