Description

pganssle

opened on Apr 25, 2022

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Feature or enhancement

Right now, the UTC singleton is only available as a class-level attribute on datetime.timezone, but I think a lot of people would probably like to be able to do this:

from datetime import UTC

Since datetime.timezone is a class, not a module, right now it is necessary for each person to define their own UTC alias (if they want such a thing) in two lines:

from datetime import timezone
UTC = timezone.utc

This isn't a huge deal, but I think it would be pretty unambiguous what it refers to and might be a nice quality of life improvement.

CC: @abalkin

Reacted by Victor Stinner, Kabir Kwatra, ajoino, Brett Cannon and Oleg Lavrovsky

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1. pganssle

   added

   type-featureA feature request or enhancementA feature request or enhancement

   on Apr 25, 2022
2. pganssle commented on Apr 27, 2022

   

   pganssle

   on Apr 27, 2022

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   I tracked down the decision between datetime.timezone.utc and datetime.UTC to this conversation primarily between @abalkin and @brettcannon. It was definitely a deliberate decision to use timezone.utc, but it doesn't seem like there were especially strong feelings about this.

   One counter-example to the "datetime seems to put its attributes in class namespaces" is that MINYEAR and MAXYEAR are global module-level constants. I am mostly convinced that we should go forward with this, particularly since a contributor has already written an excellent PR (#91973) implementing it. Any objections from @brettcannon or @abalkin?

   Reacted by ajoino and Kabir Kwatra
3. brettcannon commented on Apr 28, 2022

   

   brettcannon

   on Apr 28, 2022

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   Definitely no objections from me. 🙂

   Reacted by Paul Ganssle, Kabir Kwatra and Collins Oden
4. pganssle

   added a commit that references this issue on May 3, 2022

   feat(datetime): Add `datetime.UTC` alias for `datetime.timezone.utc`

   This issue will close once commit 65fbe0d is merged into the 'main' branch.

   65fbe0d
5. miss-islington

   closed this as completedin #91973on May 3, 2022
6. miss-islington

   added a commit that references this issue on May 3, 2022

   gh-91928: Add `datetime.UTC` alias for `datetime.timezone.utc` (GH-91973

   48c6165
7. pganssle

   reopened this on May 3, 2022
8. pganssle commented on May 3, 2022

   

   pganssle

   on May 3, 2022

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   Re-opening because this needs a What's new entry, but I selfishly didn't want to induce a merge conflict with #92177, so I'll add a What's New entry after that one gets merged.

   Reacted by Kabir Kwatra
9. miss-islington

   closed this as completedin #92567on May 10, 2022
10. miss-islington

    added 3 commits that reference this issue on May 10, 2022

    gh-91928: Add what's new entry for datetime.UTC alias (GH-92567)

    a0a825c

    pythongh-91928: Add what's new entry for datetime.UTC alias (pythonGH…

    78f1746

    gh-91928: Add what's new entry for datetime.UTC alias (GH-92567)

    2d38a2f

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