I am attaching the next version of my patch and changing priority to high because it appears that several issues depend on resolution of this one.

Here is the summary of changes since issue5094a.diff:

1. The constructor now accepts only whole number of minutes in [-23:59, 23:59] range.

2. Removed tz_aware option to utcnow().

3. Moved struct PyDateTime_TimeZone definition to .c file. This effectively makes the actual definition private so that it can be changed in the future if desired without breaking C API.

4. Removed checks that the argument passed to tzinfo methods is a timedelta.  The tzinfo spec requires that None is accepted.  Since the argument is ignored, it is wasteful to check its type.

5. Make dst() return None as recommended by tzinfo documentation when DST information is not provided.

Brett, is this close to a compromise that we can agree to or is it time to start writing a PEP? :-)

PS: The latest patch does not include doc changes.