1192546 - Calendar Application Won't Set Time Properly

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[Baram Avraham]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:39.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/39.0
Build ID: 20150708164734

Steps to reproduce:

I attempted to create an event in Calendar for March 08, 2015 (occuring --in perpetuity-- annually on the second monday in march) with a time frame of 2:00 am thru 2:05 am.


Actual results:

The program automatically adjusted the time to 3:00 am thru 3:05 am. And, would not allow the entry of the time period I desired.

NOTE: If I go back (or forward) ONE day the time will set correctly as 2:00 am thru 2:05 am.


Expected results:

The time of the event should have been accepted as 2:00 am thru 2:05 am.

Comment 1

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

If you're in the US (excluding Arizona and Hawaii), there's no such time as 2:00 AM on the second Sunday in March. That's when Daylight Savings starts, and the time jumps from 1:59:59 AM to 3:00:00 AM.

Comment 2

[Baram Avraham]

That is an absurd comment. Here's why. The application (and it's parent Thunderbird) may know what time zone you're in due to it getting that information from:

Edit-->Preferences-->Calendar-->General-->Timezone

HOWEVER, it cannot know WHERE in that timezone. Thus, a person in the eastern timezone (aka the East Coast of the U.S.) but living on any of the U.S. Possessions in the Caribbean would experience the same problem that I have because NONE of them follow DST.

Either the application is pranged because it is making the assumption or it is pranged because it doesn't allow for the user to fine tune the assumption by specifing a non-DST observing locale within a timezone.

Best yet is whether this extends to all the different versions (country specific) of Thunderbird. Now the problem gets even more interesting.

I do not think the maintainers of either the Thunderbird or Calender apps have the desire to research the laws of every country on earth every year to find out which countries and locals have changed their laws concerning observance or non-observance of DST and what time they've set to begin and end the observance.  I think they'd have bigger fish to fry with the code than obsessing over this to the point of automatically adjusting times based on when (or if) someplace will observe DST.

Comment 3

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

(In reply to Baram Avraham from comment #2)
> HOWEVER, it cannot know WHERE in that timezone.

Yes it can, because the time zone you choose is considerably more specific than a GMT offset. That's part of why you pick the nearest city: even within a particular GMT offset, there may be varying laws (most notably Daylight Savings).

> Thus, a person in the eastern timezone (aka the East Coast of the U.S.) but
> living on any of the U.S. Possessions in the Caribbean would experience the
> same problem that I have because NONE of them follow DST.

No they wouldn't. Peurto Rico and the Virgin Islands are Atlantic Time (and Lightning has a time zone specifically for "America/Puerto Rico"); Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba, which uses DST (its time zone is "America/Havana"); Navassa Island, Serranilla Bank, and Baja Nuevo Bank are all uninhabited (but would use "America/Port-au-Prince" - which uses DST - for the first and "America/Bogota" for the latter two).

> I do not think the maintainers of either the Thunderbird or Calender apps
> have the desire to research the laws of every country on earth every year to
> find out which countries and locals have changed their laws concerning
> observance or non-observance of DST and what time they've set to begin and
> end the observance.

You seem to misunderstand how time zones are handled in software. Time zone info is maintained by IANA[1] and applications which need to be aware of time zones pull the appropriate changes whenever IANA releases a new version[2].

[1] https://www.iana.org/time-zones
[2] bug 1170482, for example

Comment 4

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

If you're trying to use a time zone in the range of US longitudes, but which doesn't have DST, here are some options from the IANA 2015e revision (pick the one closest to you):

GMT-5 (Easter):
  America/Atikokan
  America/Bogota
  America/Cancun
  America/Eirunepe
  America/Guayaquil
  America/Jamaica
  America/Lima
  America/Panama
  America/Rio_Branco
  Pacific/Easter
GMT-6 (Central):
  America/Belize
  America/Costa_Rica
  America/El_Salvador
  America/Guatemala
  America/Managua
  America/Regina
  America/Swift_Current
  America/Tegucigalpa
  Pacific/Galapagos
GMT-7 (Mountain):
  America/Creston
  America/Dawson_Creek
  America/Hermosillo
  America/Phoenix
GMT-8 (Pacific):
  America/Metlakatla
  Pacific/Pitcairn

Comment 5

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

> GMT-5 (Easter):

Whoops, that should be "Eastern".

Comment 6

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

Resolving as INVALID per comment#3.