[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle  added the comment:

Thanks Łukasz. Sorry I forgot to respond last time. We've had no feedback on 
this whatsoever, and I think we've probably made the right choice, so we can go 
ahead and call this resolved.

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resolution:  -> fixed
stage: patch review -> resolved
status: open -> closed

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Łukasz Langa]

Łukasz Langa  added the comment:

Note: the release of the last RC is imminent. Whatever API changes were 
planned, they have to wait for 3.10.

--
priority: deferred blocker -> critical
versions: +Python 3.10 -Python 3.9

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Łukasz Langa]

Łukasz Langa  added the comment:

Note: next week is 3.9.0b5, the last beta before 3.9.0. Please decide what to 
do with the rest of the issue before then.

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Łukasz Langa]

Change by Łukasz Langa :


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priority: release blocker -> deferred blocker

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Łukasz Langa]

Łukasz Langa  added the comment:

This goes into 3.9, but please settle on a final design long before October. 
Scratch that, please do it ideally before beta 2.

I'm downgrading from release blocker, exception handling can be discussed and 
changed after beta 1 as well.

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[STINNER Victor]

STINNER Victor  added the comment:

def valid_key(fpath):
try:
with open(fpath, "rb") as f:
return f.read(4) == b"TZif"
except Exception:  # pragma: nocover
return False


Why not only catching "except OSError:" rather than any exception?

Or even "except (FileNotFoundError, PermissionError):" if you want to be 
pedantic :-p

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nosy: +vstinner

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle  added the comment:

I've merged the existing implementation, but I'm leaving this staged as 
"release blocker" so that Łukasz can have final say on whether this goes into 
3.9.

Thanks for the help everyone!

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle  added the comment:


New changeset e527ec8abe0849e784ce100f53c2736986b670ae by Paul Ganssle in 
branch 'master':
bpo-40536: Add zoneinfo.available_timezones (GH-20158)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/e527ec8abe0849e784ce100f53c2736986b670ae


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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Filipe Laíns]

Change by Filipe Laíns :


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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[gaborbernat]

gaborbernat  added the comment:

I think semantically the correct expression would be available timezones, free 
function, set and no cache. Document the operation is expensive and users 
should cache if they want repeated access or provide an available timezones 
cached function  my 2c

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle  added the comment:

I've opened a PR adding this feature and tagged this as release blocker, since 
I'd like to make sure this is in the beta if Łukasz does not object.

The concerns about the stability of the function I expressed earlier have not 
changed much, though we did get some feedback from the tz database list that at 
least make me think that the new approach (excluding posix/, right/ and 
posixrules) is *probably* the right way to go.

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Change by Paul Ganssle :


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pull_requests: +19461
pull_request: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/20158

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle  added the comment:

>From some discussion on the reference implementation PR, it seems that this 
>may be a more complicated feature than I had bargained for: 
>https://github.com/pganssle/zoneinfo/pull/60

The issue is that the current implementation picks up the posix/ and right/ 
directories as well as the posixrules file, none of which is *wrong* — they are 
available time zones, after all — but they're not really canonical zones. In 
`tzdata` we have a list of zones sourced from tzdata's `make zonenames`, which 
does not include the posix/ and right/ directories.

There is `zone1970.tab` and `zone.tab`, but that has *too* strict of a subset — 
it only includes canonical zones associated with a specific country, as far as 
I can tell, and not things like UTC. It also includes, for example, 
America/Nuuk but not America/Godthab (which was the canonical name up until 
2020a).

I'm considering postponing this feature to Python 3.10 so that we can have more 
time to figure out a decent API for this.

Łukasz: Question for you as release manager — would you prefer that we put this 
in for 3.9 with the understanding that before the final release we may end up 
needing to remove it as a nuisance or change what it returns (and possibly 
flags that would be passed to it), or would that be too disruptive in the beta 
period? I'm confident that we can make a final decision before October, just 
not confident that we can make a final decision before Monday.

--
assignee:  -> p-ganssle
nosy: +lukasz.langa

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Change by Paul Ganssle :


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pull_requests:  -19344

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Change by Paul Ganssle :


--
keywords: +patch
pull_requests: +19344
stage:  -> patch review
pull_request: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/19909

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle  added the comment:

I have an initial implementation against the reference implementation here: 
https://github.com/pganssle/zoneinfo/pull/60

Once GH-19909 is merged, I will turn that into a PR against CPython.

For the first pass I went with:

1. free-standing function
2. returning set()
3. no cache
4. available_timezones()

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[issue40536] Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo

[Paul Ganssle]

New submission from Paul Ganssle :

One thing that I sort of overlooked in PEP 615 that I think will be a common 
feature request for zoneinfo is the ability to get a list of time zones 
available on the current TZPATH.

This is more complicated to implement than it sounds like, but luckily I 
already did it in order to implement the property tests for the zoneinfo module:

https://github.com/pganssle/zoneinfo/blob/ffd21a6d065e04725e04b37bb430c2559fefd5fa/tests/test_zoneinfo_property.py#L23-L70

The biggest complication is that there are files on TZPATH that are not 
necessarily time zones, and when I looked I couldn't easily find a list of all 
available time zones, so the only way to tell which ones are time zones and 
which ones aren't is to open each one and read the first 4 bytes. However, 
`tzdata` does ship with a list of available time zones, so the way I've got the 
function working right now is:

1. If `tzdata` is installed – despite the fact that it's technically the end of 
the search path, convert the list of available zones that ships with `tzdata` 
to your starting set (since you know these are all valid zones).
2. Walk the `tzpath`, and every time you find something not in the set of valid 
keys, open it and read the first 4 bytes, then add that to the set.

The common cases will be that `tzdata` is not available (in which case no harm 
done), or `tzdata` has the same set of keys as the TZPATH, in which case you 
never have to open any of the TZif files. The fact that the search order is 
inverted from what it normally is doesn't matter because the output is the 
union of all the sets anyway.

I don't know that the PEP needs to be amended – if this were a feature request 
for Python 3.10 I don't think it would need a PEP to go through, but I don't 
mind amending the PEP to document it.

Design decisions (with my initial answers, loosely held):

1. Should this be a classmethod or a free-standing function?

I'm inclined towards free-standing function because zoneinfo.TZPATH is at the 
module level and not the class level.

2. What should the return type be?

I think frozenset() or set(); a sorted list is also a reasonable option, but 
for people who just want to use "in" or show some subset of available zones, 
that would be wasteful.

We should go with frozenset() if we want there to be some possibility of 
caching the result in the future.

3. Should we try to cache the result?

I would say no, at least for now. It would not be super easy to get the cache 
invalidation right in the general case, and not many people are likely to be 
sensitive to the performance of this operation – the people who are can easily 
create their own cache.

4. What should it be called?

Naming things is hard. Options:

- zoneinfo.timezones()
- zoneinfo.all_timezones()
- zoneinfo.timezone_{list,set}()
- zoneinfo.valid_timezones()
- zoneinfo.valid_keys()
- zoneinfo.available_timezones()

`pytz` has a similar thing and calls it all_timezones. It also has something 
called common_timezones, but that is a bit harder to pull off and I'm not 
confident that we'll get something satisfactory before the feature freeze.

--
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 368285
nosy: belopolsky, lemburg, p-ganssle
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Addition of a "list of available time zones" function to zoneinfo
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.9

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