I think we're stuck with strftime for quite a while, no matter how ugly it is. datetime.__format__ uses it, for example. Although maybe it's possible to write an strftime-format to new-format translator.

If we're going to take this on (re-writing strftime), I think the way to do it is to have it take the locale info as a parameter, and if that parameter is NULL then look up the info in the current locale. It looks like it's still a problem to find all of the info in the locale on all platforms, though. Finding the locale info is no doubt the tricky part, as someone said.

I agree it would be easier to write this from scratch rather than track down the licensing on the existing patch. As it is, there's just not much code there.