Safer types for datetime
- Dominant language
- Python
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- 1d 19h
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Description
At Dropbox we are currently debating what to do with the deprecation of datetime.utcnow from cpython upstream.
This deprecation is problematic because adjusting a single datetime to timezone-aware breaks its interoperability with other datetimes across the codebase. We have several thousand calls to datetime.utcnow and I am sure we are not the only ones in this situation.
It seems to me that in order to use timezone aware datetimes there is a need for these two different categories of datetimes to be separated on the type level. Perhaps this could be a generic argument with two possible parameters. I thought about suggesting it to the mypy repository, but I think perhaps it makes more sense to discuss this at typeshed, but I could be wrong. On the other hand, making the type generic is also a large breaking change in itself, which may not be desirable.
Without such type level distinction, I don't see how any large codebase can properly remove utcnow - the other option we are considering is to mass replace every callsite and use replace(tzinfo=None) which just makes the codebase worse than before - and perhaps dangerous if anyone starts creating timezone aware datetimes once utcnow is gone.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Begin with the datetime.utcnow deprecation discussion and linked pull request #11844. Clarify whether typeshed should represent naive and timezone-aware datetimes as distinct types, then define the affected stubs and type-checking behavior before implementation.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- tooling
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100