It turns out I misunderstood how date.today() worked [1] and issue9079.diff introduced significant change in behavior.  Bringing timeofday into core rather than _time.c also introduced several complications.  As a result it makes sense to start with just internal restructuring: bring gettimeofday into core and reuse it in time.time and datetime.datetime.now.  The new patch, issue9079a.diff contains no user visible changes.


[1] "Curious datetime method" http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-July/102003.html