Replacing python-dateutil to remove six

16 points by ubernostrum

fly

This is probably going to break in June. Or even just 1/1/2026.

ubernostrum
I'm not sure what you mean by this comment. The three examples given are:
1. A piece of code which needs to calculate a date six months in the future, but which does not have strict precision requirements. Using 180 days as an approximation of six months is acceptable for that code's use case, and (because it is using Python's built-in timedelta construct to represent the 180-day span) is not affected by year boundaries and does not need to special-case for them.
2. A piece of code which needs to know the starting and ending date of a particular month. This simply switched from using a third-party API to using an equivalent one, returning the same data, built in to the Python standard library. It is not affected by year boundaries and does not need to special-case for them.
3. A piece of code which needs to generate a YYYY-MM format string to represent the calendar month prior to one being worked with. This is affected by year boundaries, does need to special-case for them, and the example code given handles the case of a year boundary.
Perhaps you could elaborate on which of these you think will imminently break, and why?

dryya

+1 on import datetime as dt, I got that from the same source about a year ago and it's been a minor but real QoL improvement. If you use ruff you can enforce it with

[tool.ruff.lint.flake8-import-conventions.extend-aliases]
"datetime" = "dt"

matthew2

Goodbye six, and we also get slightly quicker install, import and run times.

Is there something especially problematic about six, or is it just about having one fewer dependency to install?

talideon

No, Six isn't problematic, but the fact that it's still in use is. It was only ever meant to help bridge a compatibility gap between Python 2 and Python 3. Python 2 has been EOL for so long six should be unnecessary by now, but it's still used in a bunch of places because nobody's bothered removing it.