673437 - Events created with time zones show up at strange times after system time zone changed

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Calendar :: Calendar Frontend, defect)

Description

[Gerard M]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C)
Build ID: 20100115144158

Steps to reproduce:

I created events in my normal time zone and also in a time zone to which I planned to travel soon. When I arrived in the new location I changed the current system Windows 7) time zone. 


Actual results:

When first created, the new events in the other time zone showed up at wierd times in my calendar. This made it hard to determine whether they were correct.
When I changed the system time zone, nothing happened. Lightning seems to ignore the system time zone. I had to find and change a lightning timezone preference before it made the new location events show up at the correct time. And all my home events now showed up at a strange time.


Expected results:

1. When I change the system time zone, the calendar should use that zone as the default time zone for all new events. I should not have to change a Lightning preference.
2. All events should show up on my calendar at the time they are specified (e.g. 3pm MDT should show up at 3pm) regardless of what time zone the system is currently set to.  9am in India shows up at 8:30pm on the previous in an MDT calendar and this just isn't right. Yes, travel events (depart 3pm MDT arrive 11pm EDT) would occupy 8 hours instead of the "correct" 6 hours, but it would make a lot more sense to the person using the calendar.

Comment 1

[Ralph Giles (:rillian)]

I ran into this as well. I did a fresh install of Lightning (and Thunderbird) on MacOS X while at a conference in Australia. Lightning remembered that timezone and continued to use it even after I returned home to Canada. When I returned, MacOS changed the timezone to match the current network location, but Lightning remained set to Australia/Melbourne.

Appointments from my CalDAV calendar show, and notifications appear at the appropriate time, but the actual time and date shown was always the time in Australia, not the local time. Since that's across the date line, this was very confusing!

Changing the timezone manually in Preferences::Lightning::Timezone resolved the issue for me.

Lightning should monitor the system timezone and update its settings to match.