I figured that for most cases you wouldn't actually care what the timezone was. You would either always be displaying things in a timezone relative to the user, or you'd use some other external information (ex. coordinates of person or thing attached to the datetime object) to derive a contextually appropriate timezone.
For cases where you do want to retain the timezone, how about allowing the TZ-aware DateTime field to store the TZ data to an optional secondary field? That field could be a regular CharField. It wouldn't be needed for any of the date-based sorting or filtering. There's precedent for this sort of behaviour with the GenericForeignKey, and I think it would be fine, especially if the secondary field was optional. What do you think? Sam On 2011-06-28, at 9:26 AM, Stephen Burrows wrote: > I agree that it would be nice to be able to store tz-aware datetimes - > but if django were going to do so, it ought to store the datetimes > with the timezone information intact, rather than converting > everything to the project's timezone. So, if a conversion to UTC were > to take place, there would need to be a separate field in the database > to store the timezone. > > On Jun 27, 3:12 pm, Sam Bull <osir...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 2011-06-02, at 12:34 AM, Stephen Burrows wrote: >> >>> Django actually already adds support for some capabilities to certain >>> database backends, if I'm not mistaken - such as cascades through GFKs >>> on delete. >> >>> In terms of time zones, could django "assume"/ensure that the datetime >>> stored in the backend is UTC, then handle the conversion to the local >>> timezone itself? >> >> Isn't this a viable solution? It's the universal, cross-timezone-friendly >> datetime objects that we care about, not the timezones they were in, right? >> >> - If the DB supports timezone-aware datetime fields, just pass the datetime >> object through as is. >> >> - If the DB doesn't support timezone-aware datetime fields, convert to UTC >> and store the datetime as UTC >> >> - If the datetime has tz info, convert the time to UTC using that >> >> - If the datetime doesn't have tz info, convert using the default timezone >> specified in the settings >> >> When retrieving the data from a non-timezone-aware db, convert them from UTC >> to the project's timezone. >> >> Sam > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Django developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
