Inquiry Regarding Timezone Database Update for Kazakhstan Time Zone Change

[babur-rustauletov]

Dear Pendulum Developers,

I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to inquire about the recent time zone change in Kazakhstan and how it is being addressed in the Pendulum library. Given the importance of accurate time zone data for our applications, we want to ensure that we are using the most updated information available.

As you may be aware, the IANA Time Zone Database recently included changes to the Kazakhstan time zone (as of version 2024a, released on February 1st), reflecting the country's shift in time zone settings. This update is crucial for our operations, as we rely on Pendulum for time zone conversions and scheduling in our applications.

Could you please inform us about the following:

Has the Pendulum timezone database been updated to incorporate these changes? If so, in which version of Pendulum can we find this update?
If the update has not yet been implemented, do you have an estimated timeline for when it might be included?
Is there any recommended action we should take on our end to ensure our applications reflect this time zone change accurately? For example, manually updating the Pendulum timezone database or configuring Pendulum to use the system’s timezone database.

We appreciate the effort you put into maintaining the Pendulum library and understand the challenges in keeping the timezone database current. Your guidance on this matter will greatly assist us in planning our next steps and ensuring our systems remain accurate and reliable.

Thank you for your time and assistance. We look forward to your response.

Best regards, Babur

[Muguett-DBY]

For Pendulum 3.x, this is available without waiting for a new Pendulum release. It uses zoneinfo, which reads system IANA data first and falls back to the Python tzdata package. Kazakhstan's change is in tzdb 2024a, distributed as tzdata==2024.1.

Update the data in your application's environment, including its lockfile if you use one:

python -m pip install --upgrade "tzdata>=2024.1"

If your system has older IANA files, those can still take precedence. Update the system data too, or set PYTHONTZPATH to an empty string in the application's launch environment, before Python starts, to use the package instead. This is the documented zoneinfo setting. Restart the application after updating.

You can check the result with:

import pendulum

print(pendulum.datetime(2024, 2, 29, 12, tz="Asia/Almaty").isoformat())
print(pendulum.datetime(2024, 3, 2, 12, tz="Asia/Almaty").isoformat())

Expected:

2024-02-29T12:00:00+06:00
2024-03-02T12:00:00+05:00

I checked both Almaty and Qostanay with Pendulum 3.0.0 and 3.3.0: the 2024.1 package gives the change on both. An older directory in the search path reproduces the stale offset even with the newer package installed. These instructions cover 3.x; Pendulum 2.x uses a different timezone implementation.

_{AI-assisted with Codex; verified on Windows and Linux, Python 3.12, in fresh processes.}