[Kolab-devel] Time zone issues with Kontact 4.7.X

[Heiner Markert]

Hello,

I recently tested the Kontact version from KDE 4.7.1-4.7.4 with my existing 
Kolab 2.3.4 server.
The following bug regarding daylight saving time occurs: Repeating events that 
already exist on the server show at different times during normal and 
daylight saving time. For example, a weekly repeating event starts at 7.30 am 
during summer, and at 6.30 am during winter. In earlier versions of kontact, 
it used to show at 7.30 throughout the whole year.

Hence, I reported a bug against KDEPIM:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=285743

They basically answered that the event is stored in UTC on the server and 
hence it has to be expected that it shows at different times with respect to 
daylight saving, and that events should instead be stored using the local 
time and corresponding time zone information.

However, in the kolab storage format specification, UTC is the only allowed 
date-time representation, see 
http://kolab.org/doc/kolabformat-2.0-html/x147.html#AEN167

As far as I understand, this basically means that a recent kontact will not 
work correctly with a kolab 2 server, because
a) it display repeating events at the wrong time occasionally and
b) it stores events in local time with additional time zone information, 
violating the kolab format spec.

I hope someone can help me understanding what's going on, and how the problem 
could eventually be solved.

Best regards
Heiner Markert