timezones, question of

Helge Hess helge.hess at opengroupware.org
Thu Feb 5 22:53:16 CET 2009


On 05.02.2009, at 15:57, Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
> Which hints at another problem of the Kolab format: For full day  
> events we drop the time information and here we really loose  
> critical information if the event does not take place in our own  
> timezone.

This is also a difficult issue, mostly because its difficult for the  
user to understand.

 From a technical perspective there are two kinds of full day events  
(actually it applies to any time value):
a) floating
b) fixed

For example a birthday is a typical floating full day event. It  
doesn't matter which timezone you are in - it goes from 0:00-23:59 in  
any timezone.

This does not only apply to allday. For example you could have an  
event like 'wake me at 8am'. Timezone or DST doesn't matter for that,  
you always need to get up at 8, whether you are at a US customer site  
or in Europe.


I've never understood why you dropped iCalendar as the entity format.  
Its not complex due to design by committee, but because the domain  
_is_ that complex.
If you start enhancing the XML to support what is actually necessary,  
you quickly end up with iCalendar ... Solution: just revert back to  
the iCal based Kolab format! ;-) After all Kontact has one of the best  
and most complete iCalendar implementations!

Greets,
   Helge
-- 
Helge Hess
http://helgehess.eu/




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