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A Python Epoch Timestamp Timezone Trap (nerderati.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The return value of time.time() is actually a floating-point number ... It's also not guaranteed to be monotonically increasing, which is a whole other thing that can trip people up, but that will have to be a separate blog post.

Oh god, I didn't realize that about Python and the POSIX spec. Cautiously, I'm going to guess that GPS seconds are one of the few reliable ways to uniformly convey a monotonically-increasing time reference.

Python has long since deprecated the datetime.datetime.utcnow() function, because it produces a naive object that is ostensibly in UTC.

Ok, this is just a plainly bad decision then and now by the datetime library people. What possible reason could have existed to produce a TZ-naive object from a library call that only returns a reference to UTC?

[–] pelya 1 points 4 months ago

You also have CLOCK_MONOTONIC, which could or could not be the number of seconds since last reboot.

To be honest, this mess was directly inherited from POSIX C system calls.