Alexander, I agree with Velko in that it isn't obvious to me how the addition of localtime would answer the desire expressed in this issue.  It addresses Antoine's complaint about aware datetimes, but I don't see that it does anything for the "conversion to epoch based timestamp" issue.  That is at the very least a documentation issue, since IMO we should be providing our users with the tools they need to interoperate with the systems they need to interoperate with.

Velko: on the other hand, given Victor's research, I don't see float seconds since an epoch appearing anywhere as a standard.  Where do you see this being used as a standard?  I also don't understand your complaint about the fact that the one-liner creates a timetuple.  datetime stores the date and time information as discrete fields, so generating a timetuple is a natural conversion path.  

Obviously one could avoid the creation of a Python tuple by calling the C mktime directly in the C code, as has been proposed.  I don't see, myself, what would be so bad about providing a 'to_crt_timestamp' method that would, in essence, be the kind of light wrapper around the system API that we provide in so many other places in Python.