pytz VS tz

Well, pytz actually is technically flawed at the moment because it cannot read TZif Version 2+ files, so it breaks for dates >2038 (and it would break if you tried to point it at system data generated with zic's "slim" mode), see this: https://github.com/stub42/pytz/issues/48

But you are right that pandas' use of pytz is benign and as far as I know doesn't suffer the same usability issues.

If I understand this correctly from the documentation, pytz (or rather the tz database for which the library provides an interface) accounts for political shifts/changes in time zone data / DST.

A link was added from "Europe/Kiev" to "Europe/Kyiv" in the included-by-default backward file [0], so that any user that doesn't exclude that file will simply treat the old name as an alias for the new name.

[0] https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/e13e9c531fc48a04fb8d064a...

timeZone: Determines the current timezone to use to display the time e.g. America/Los_Angeles. Full list can be found on IANA time zone database

"Eire" is in there, for instance, to deal with software that assumes that the "is_dst" half of the year is during the (northern) summer, but Ireland technically does it the other way around -- a distinction relevant only to computers.

https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/c3e966c59b02b1f47f0b7b0e4a...

The only other timezone that currently has a non-1h offset for DST -- Ireland's is -1 hours -- is Australia/Lord_Howe, which has a 30-min positive leap.

Prof Paul Eggert is currently the editor and coordinator of the Time Zone Database of IANA, which enables timestamps on official documents and photos.

I've looked at it, but wanted to work with the tz source repository directly (I think local-time gets their zone files from Ubuntu). Also getting zic running in a portable way seemed too much of a hassle. The text file format is not all that complicated and documented in the zic manual pretty well. This approach is also chosen by the JDK as far as I can tell.

Subscribe to tz-announce for more fun: https://www.iana.org/time-zones

Unfortunately, you just wait. The person(s) at IANA who manages The Time Zone Database is certainly aware, and from there it "just" has to percolate down to Google and your phone.

most systems use https://www.iana.org/time-zones

And have you looked at the TZ database? My God it's a hot mess, and for good reason: human governments are terrible at creating code. Worse even than beginning CS students, because at least CS students know they don't know what they're doing, while politicians are both stupid and arrogant enough to think they're not stupid.