# PEP 615: Support for the IANA Time Zone Database in the Standard Library

**URL:** <https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-615-support-for-the-iana-time-zone-database-in-the-standard-library/3468>\
**Category:** PEPs\
**Created:** [February 25, 2020, 3:34pm UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-615-support-for-the-iana-time-zone-database-in-the-standard-library/3468 "2020-02-25T15:34:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 21

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**Author:** ![fweimer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d2c977/32.png) [@fweimer](https://discuss.python.org/u/fweimer)\
**Post date:** [February 28, 2020, 12:10pm UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-615-support-for-the-iana-time-zone-database-in-the-standard-library/3468/21 "2020-02-28T12:10:51Z")

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I strongly believe that users want to reload time zone data transparently, without restarting their applications. The on-disk data is updated fairly frequently, see [Red Hat Enterprise Linux Timezone Data (tzdata) - Development Status Page](https://access.redhat.com/articles/1187353) for an example of what one distribution does. I do not think that users would want to restart their application (with a scheduled downtime) just to apply one of those updates.

This means that the caching in the `ZoneInfo` constructor is very problematic.

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_[View the full topic](https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-615-support-for-the-iana-time-zone-database-in-the-standard-library/3468)._