iCal file shift (Was: Re: Photos)

[Derek Neighbors]

Alan Dayley wrote:
> Derek Neighbors said:
>> That doesn't seem to be the issue.
>>
>> http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=86090919&size=o
> 
> Interesting.  My calendar shows all the dates correct (see attached). 
> Yours shows them all shifted one day early EXCEPT the InstallFest.  That's
> probably a hint of some kind.
> 
> I am a complete novice at these iCal files, etc.  Does someone else want
> to debug this?

Very quick review...  It appears that the Mozilla iCal is TimeZone 
agnostic and does everything off UTC time.  Since most of our meetings 
are late the DTSTART and DTEND are on a different date (UTC) than the 
meeting themselves (Installfest is the exception).  iCal seems to ignore 
at that point the actual recurrence rule (RRULE) and instead do 
something funky because of the date (in iCal it actually rewrites the 
RRULE).

Original Mozilla iCal:
DTSTART
  :20051014T010000Z
DTEND
  :20051014T040000Z


If you update to include timezone and change UTC accordingly
DTSTART
  ;TZID=America/Phoenix:20051013T190000Z
DTEND
  ;TZID=America/Phoenix:20051013T230000Z

It then works fine in iCal.

So there are two questions in my mind.

a) Is it a bug that Mozilla is not supporting timezone.
b) Is it a bug that iCal uses the DTSTART/DTEND as an override to RRULE?

I would like to know both questions so I can file bugs with one or both 
products accordingly. :)  I just don't have the time to do that research.


>>> What did you want to comment on?
>> On the iCal article.
> 
> I'll see what it takes to comment on an article.  I did not see it as a
> needed feature since the old sight rarely got any comments.  In fact,
> about a year or more ago I posted an article on the site whose only
> purpose was to ask for comments.  As I recall, it finaly got one comment
> after 3 weeks.  It did not seem to be a feature desired by the group.

I wouldn't bother then.  I was just going to respond on this issue to 
the story instead of here on the list to cut down on the noise, but I 
think you are correct people don't frequent the site in a manner that is 
strong on comments.  So it probably isn't worth the effort.

--
Derek