[kronolith] Date and Timezones..

[Simon Brereton]

Hi

I'm addressing this to Kronolith but for me it'a system-wide issue as
it affects sync as well.

The specific issue is that I have a user complaining about an error -

DateTime::_construct(): Failed to parse time string (-001-11-01) at
position 7 (-): Double timezone specification

when trying to create an appointment.

More generally time zones are an issue that I can't get right.
Hopefully you can advise me how to fix this.

The server is set to UTC.  Most of the users are either UTC+1, GMT or
UTC-5.  What happens for the UTC-5 users (i.e. me) is that if I create
an all-day appointment or mark a contact with the a birthday), the
time is stored in UTC.  When this syncs to my device with activesync,
it shows up at 7pm on the preceding day even though in my Horde
Preferences I have my time-zone set to America/New York (i.e. UTC-5).
If I then go into the device and edit the time-zone to be EST then
when I log back into Horde, the appointment is now pushed over into a
second day.  I illustrate with a real-world numbers example...

I have a contact with a birthday on the 11th of January.  In Horde, I
create the all-day appointment on the 11th (repeating yearly, etc).
The phone shows the appointment as starting on the 10th at 7pm (even
though it's all-day - i.e. it shows up at the top of both the 10th and
the 11th and I get the reminder (set to 5 minutes) at 6.55pm EST).  If
I then edit the appointment to be EST on the device this makes the
appointment correctly show up on the device only on the 11th (with the
reminder at 11.55pm on the 10th) but when I log into Horde the
appointment is now showing from the 11/01/2012 to 12/01/2012 and
appears in both days.

Similarly the GMT and UTC+1 users have the reverse problem...

They create the appointment but then appointment reminder is either
late or the appointment shows on the day AFTER.  If they edit it on
the device to be GMT (or UTC+1) then the appointment shows correctly
on the device but when they go back to Horde the appointment is now
showing on day before in Horde.

To be clear, I don't think this is a Horde issue - I'm perfectly
willing to believe I've set something up incorrectly, but I'd be
grateful is someone could say what.

Regular (i.e. 1 hour/12 hour/30 min) appointments don't have this issue.
But if it isn't me, then I think the solution would be as in other
PIMs to be able to set the time-zone for the appointments/contacts.

Simon