Re: [Evolution] DST

[Paul Smith <paul paulandlesley org>]

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 11:28 -0400, Chris Murphy wrote:
> I'm running Evolution 2.2.3 on Fedora Core 4.  I have the same problem
> as many other people where my calender alerts are 1 hour off.  I have
> seen many questions but no answers to this problem here or on the many
> forums I have looked in.  Is there a fix for this or is the only
> solution to wait until April for the old DST to take effect.

Yeah, it's pretty not-good :-(

However, you can fix it by hand if you want; I did and it worked for me
on my Ubuntu Edgy system.

First, as root, edit the .ics file for your timezone in
the /usr/share/evolution-data-server-1.8/zoneinfo/America/; mine is
New_York.ics.  Or you can change them all if you want.  Look for a line
like this:

        RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=4;BYDAY=1SU

(the items separated by ";" might be in a different order).  Change the
BYMONTH value to 3 (for March) and the BYDAY value to 2SU (for second
Sunday):

        RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU

That should be enough to fix the red line in your calendar, but to fix
the appointments in your calendar you have to also edit the .ics files
in your ~/.evolution directory that have this RRULE; you can find all
the .ics files like that with:

        find ~/.evolution -name \*.ics | xargs grep -l
        'RRULE.*BYDAY=1SU'


<rant>
This whole thing is so bogus to me: managing of time robustly (including
timezone changes, DST, leap years, leap seconds, etc. etc.) has been a
solved problem in UNIX for decades.  The fact that Evolution and/or iCal
are not using those perfectly good facilities and methods just really
irks me, as a software designer :-/.
</rant>