1802092 - Bad date writing for VCARDs in version 3.0

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[adrien.rybarczyk]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/107.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Create a contact on a CardDAV address book
2. Specify a birthday

Actual results:

The recorded date does not work. The field is specified in a 4.0 format but the version sent is 3.0 (example: BDAY;VALUE=DATE:19890814)

With Version 4.0:
BDAY:19960415
BDAY:--0415
BDAY;19531015T231000Z
BDAY;VALUE=text:circa 1800
Version 3.0 only has:
BDAY:1996-04-15
BDAY:1953-10-15T23:10:00Z
BDAY:1987-09-27T08:30:00-06:00

Expected results:

To have the formalism of the field that adapts to the version and avoids losing data.

Comment 1

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

I don't think what we do is invalid. In the formal grammar section of RFC 2426¹, it says the value of a BDAY can be a date-value ("A single date value as defined in " RFC 2425²) or a date-time-value ("A single date-time value as defined in " RFC 2425²). RFC 2425 lists both 1985-04-12 and 19850412 as examples of the date format³. Although this is somewhat contradicted by the BDAY section, which you quoted.

¹ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2426#page-31
² https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2426#page-37
³ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2425#page-13.

Is there a real-world example where the difference is a problem?

Comment 2

[adrien.rybarczyk]

The concern is for vCard 3.0

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2426#section-3.1.5
https://github.com/nextcloud/contacts/issues/122#issuecomment-279232821

I agree that the definition is not clear.
Examples for "date":
1985-04-12
1996-08-05,1996-11-11
19850412
With the date type that theoretically allows the case without "-" but in reality it is not the case.

I tested the behavior with a CardDAV server and vCard 3.0 and I had data loss on these parts.

Comment 3

[adrien.rybarczyk]

Still present in 114