> As you explain in your own documentation, the proposed method 
> is equivalent to ``(time.mktime(self.timetuple()), self.microsecond)``,
> so all it does is replacing a less than a one-liner.

a one-liner, but an horrible one liner :-) I don't like mixing datetime and time modules. I prefer to use only datetime, I prefer its API.

>  ... If the tzinfo of the datetime object does not match the 
> system TZ used by mktime, the result will be quite misleading.

Can you suggest a possible fix to take care of the timezone information? I don't know how to use that.