Thanks, I'll let this go. (datetime is even worse - it does not handle any timezone data, and requires users to create their own timezone info).

So right now Python has no support for the functions that are readily available to GNU C-lib users of time, that's that, and I won't argue about it, will just assume Python cannot produce RFC 822 conformant dates with standard libraries. (Perl, PHP, all work fine (but they are not Python)).

(C-lib strftime has no problems printing %z with the time-tuple - with just dst info - because it is supposed to be the local time zone as set on the computer. No data needed in the tuple.
From the man page:
       %z     The  time-zone  as  hour  offset  from  GMT.   Required  to emit
              RFC 822-conformant dates (using "%a, %d  %b  %Y  %H:%M:%S  %z").
              (GNU)
)