django.utils.timezone.now should return local time when used with timezone.activate

[bach@…]

I think using django.utils.timezone.now should return a timezone aware datetime object when used in conjunction with timezone.activate

For example,

timezone.activate('US/Pacific')
now = timezone.now()

now is a value that is UTC time instead of US/Pacific time. I understand that activate is used for rendering in templates but it's confusing when a user calls activate expecting that timezone to be activated and timezone.now doesn't obey that activation. If they aren't supposed to work together, I don't think they should belong in the same module.

[Aymeric Augustin]

timezone.activate() isn't used only for templates. It's used to change the current time zone. This affects ​QuerySet.datetimes for example.

timezone.now() uses neither the default not the current time zone. It works ​as documented and it would be quite disruptive to change its behavior.

Thanks for the proposal, but I'm not sure it's a good idea (using UTC here was a deliberate choice) and the drawbacks of a change certainly outweigh the advantages at this point.

Use timezone.localtime() to convert an aware datetime to another timezone.

[rpq]

I should mention that using the timezone filter to force the conversion works on these datetime fields.