Tuesday, March 20, 2007

What time is it anyway ?

With the Daylight Savings Time redefined in some of the countries this year, it was a good time to visit old bugs and discover others which had been lurking in the dark. Chen has been doing a fabulous job fixing the timezone data used by evolution-data-server and recently, he posted a migration tool to sanitize current and future appointments in the Evolution calendar that had been created in the past.

The timezone data generated by vzic does not always seem to agree with the Exchange Servers or with timeanddate.com as Chen had pointed out in an earlier post. If you happen to notice something you believe is still incorrect in Evolution 2.10.0, please let us know here.

Then again, we are just buying time before there is one blessed authorized timezone database on the Desktop which all applications consume and I wonder when would that be.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

dateandtime.com looks like a spam site.

Anonymous said...

Too bad Evolution faithfully copied the Outlook bug that gives the program its own independent notion of time zones. This is already taken care of at the OS level. You don't need a common desktop-specific way to do time zones or DST. The C library gives you this information via standard calls.

A basic principle of good design is to avoid cases where there are multiple things that must be kept consistent. Should a national government change time zones again, you want users to do one update and then have all applications on their system correct. Any app that needs a separate update is broken.