Re: [Evolution-hackers] Bug in mail summary view

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

On Mon, 2003-08-25 at 01:22, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> A bunch of FreeBSD users have reported that the date/time in the mail
> summary view sometimes shows up incorrectly.  That is, instead of
> showing up with a localtime offset, it shows up with a UTC/GMT offset. 
> I had never been able to reproduce this.  My mail summary view always
> had the right date/time.
> 
> However, tonight, a new Evo user reported that this only happens if you
> start in Mail, then switch to, say, the Executive Summary, then back to
> Mail.  Sure enough, I switch from Mail to Summary then back, and now all
> my date/times showed up offset from GMT.  That is, one message went from
> 6:33 PM to 10:33 PM (I live in EDT).  This is 100% reproduceable thus
> far.

Hm... I think this is in bugzilla somewhere, although I hadn't realized
it was reliably reproducible.

I *think* the problem is that libical does this in a few places:

	putenv("TZ=UTC");
	t = mktime (&tm);
	putenv(old_tz);

(Yeah, I know. We didn't write it. :-) If it only happened sporadically
I'd say it was probably a race condition between threads, but if it
happens all the time on FreeBSD, maybe there's some problem with libc
caching the value of TZ or something like that?

The latest libical has been fixed to not do this, so Evo 2.0 shouldn't
have the bug. (Assuming that's what it is.) You could try patching
libical/src/libical/icaltime.c in your sources to use the make_time()
function from libical 0.24 (downloadable from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeassociation/) instead of
putenv+mktime.

-- Dan