Am 09.08.2021 um 13:17 schrieb Bald Eagle:

>> - The current broken variant of the behavior has been around for quite a
>> while, and people have been using it. From their perspective, the only
>> thing wrong about the broken behavior is that there's a trailing "Z"
>> behind the default date/time strings generated.
> 
> Why not keep it the way it is an have an option/flag for removing the Z?

Because the current status is inconsistent. It currently does different 
things on different systems.

Just adding a flag to suppress the trailing "Z" seems a bit daft to me, 
as it just dumps all the responsibility into the user's lap to get 
things working properly, when we could just as well implement a 
mechanism that does everything right out of the box, while not being any 
more complex - from the user's point of view.


> Gotta head out in a few, so only briefly:
> A lot of this seems complicated, and I personally dislike too many options and
> settings.

Maybe you're confuzzled by the fact that I've described impementation 
details, not just what the user sees in a standard use case.


> Would it be a bad thing to have localtime (), utctime (), and timezone () as
> completely separate functions?

If you can describe a system of such functions that works consistently, 
and is reasonably foolproof to use, then I'd be happy to take it into 
consideration.

As it currently stands, this sounds like a system with a couple of 
building blocks but no mortar to properly tie them together, so the user 
has to mix their own and hope that it's suited for the task.

Pitfalls are plenty in the world of time and timezones, so I'd prefer 
users not have to worry about it themselves (unless they know what they 
are doing and consciously decide to do their own worrying).


> No idea what to do about daylight savings time
> since it's such a bad idea that there are people organizing and petitioning to
> get rid of it all together.

For the time being (no pun intended), daylight savings time does exist 
as an undeniable fact of life we have to put up with. If we try to 
ignore it, we will produce a program that breaks at least half of the 
time in half of the world.

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