Tests fail on Windows due to missing `tzdata` package

[denini08]

What happened?

While running the tests on my Windows machine, I got errors when loading the "Europe/Berlin" timezone.
On Linux this works because Python reads time zone info from the OS, but on Windows it requires the PyPI tzdata package to be installed.

This caused the following tests to fail:

• tests/microgrid/test_microgrid_api.py::TestMicrogridApi::test_connection_manager
• tests/microgrid/test_microgrid_api.py::TestMicrogridApi::test_connection_manager_another_method

What did you expect instead?

The tests run and pass.

Affected version(s)

No response

Affected part(s)

Build script, CI, dependencies, etc. (part:tooling)

Extra information

No response

[llucax]

Hi @denini08, this is a tricky one, as we don't officially support Windows. Maybe at some point we should, but to offer any Windows support we would need to include it in our tests. Fixing this and never testing on Windows again is not really a sustainable solution.

Maybe we can leave this issue opened (and pinned) so people can get some guidance if they want to try out the SDK in Windows, but again, we don't officially support it at the moment (in a not very far future hopefully we will).

[denini08]

Hey @llucax, thanks for the feedback! I totally understand that Windows is not officially supported at the moment.

Still, I think merging this PR would be harmless and potentially beneficial:

• The tzdata package is only installed when running on Windows, so it doesn’t affect Linux or macOS users at all.
• This way, the repository is already “future-proofed” if/when Windows support becomes official.
• In the meantime, it avoids confusion for anyone trying to run the SDK on Windows (since the fix is already in place).

So even if Windows isn’t part of the CI yet, I believe merging this PR today adds value without introducing risks.

[llucax]

Hey @denini08, those are good points, but I'm still slightly concerned about adding stuff that is not verified, for example if we stop needing tzdata nobody will really find out and the dependency will be kept there for no reason. We need an owner for every line of code to ensure project's health. I know in this case it is a bit of a philosophical issue, and the implications of accepting the patch are very low stakes.

On the other hand, and since this only affect tests, I would rather just remove the dependency on tzdata, and remove the use of zoneinfo. We really don't need to test zoneinfo resolution works, we just want to pass a timezone to the Location class, so we can just use timezone.utc or timezone(timedelta(hours=1), "Europe/Berlin") if we want to be fancy and still simulate some other timezone (which I don't think is really necessary).

If you want to submit a PR that removes the use of zoneinfo, I would be much more comfortable merging that.

[denini08]

@llucax understand your point. About the PR, I made a new commit, but I don't know if that's the only thing I should remove. Could you check again?