I am attaching a patch from issue 5288 as an example of a change that I would favor more than issue7989-cmp.diff. This patch eliminates _utcoffset and _dst methods that duplicate utcoffset and dst, but return integer minutes rather than a timedelta.
I am not checking these changes in sandbox because these are examples of how I plan to improve C implementation when datetime.py makes it into the main tree. I envision such changes to be discussed within context of datetime.py and if approved, implemented in C and committed simultaneously.
Improving datetime.py implementation and making it diverge from C implementation defeats the purpose I see in having datetime.py in the first place.
Antoine?