This idea was brought in the original fixed offset timezone proposal (see issue 5094), but was met with some opposition.  See msg106914, point 2. As a result, the timezone implementation is in conflict with tzinfo documentation that says "If utcoffset() does not return None, dst() should not return None either." http://docs.python.org/dev/py3k/library/datetime.html#datetime.tzinfo.utcoffset


Note that dst() is not needed for time calculations involving fixed offset timezones because DST shift is included in utcoffset().  It is however needed for interoperability with timetuple time representation. See issue9004.

If the long term goal is to move users from using timetuples to to datetime objects, it is important for time objects to be able to store DST flag.