Here is the history of the issue per Martin v. Löwis on python-dev:

"""

This was added with

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r36221 | bcannon | 2004-06-24 03:38:47 +0200 (Do, 24. Jun 2004) | 3 Zeilen

Add compilation of timemodule.c with datetimemodule.c to get
__PyTime_DoubleToTimet().

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So it's clearly intentional. I doubt its desirable, though. If only
__PyTime_DoubleToTimet needs to be duplicated, I'd rather put that
function into a separate C file that gets included twice, instead of including the full timemodule.c into datetimemodule.c.
"""
-- "Sharing functions between C extension modules in stdlib", http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-June/100587.html

I hope this is non-controversial, but I would like someone to comment on the choice of file name.  I chose _timefunc.c to make it more distinguishable from module file names.  Ideally, however I would like to see this in either _time.h/_time.c pair (both in Module dir like _math.{c,h}) or in pytime.h/pytime.c (like pymath.{c,h}).

Marking this as "resource usage" because the patch will result in smaller size of datetime module.