Timezones

Getting localized time right, seems to be the most difficult part about calendaring (and messing it up ends in missing the one imported meeting of the week). So I’ll briefly describe here, how khal tries to handle timezone information, which information it can handle and which it can’t.

All datetimes are saved to the local database as UTC Time. Datetimes that are already UTC Time, e.g. 19980119T070000Z are saved as such. Datetimes in local time and with a time zone reference that khal can understand (Olson database) are converted to UTC and than saved, e.g. TZID=America/New_York:19980119T020000. Floating times, e.g. 19980118T230000 (datetimes which are neither UTC nor have a timezone specified) are treated as if the default timezone (specified in khal’s config file) was specified. Datetimes with a specified timezone that khal does not understand are treated as if they were floating time.

khal expects you want all start and end dates displayed in local time (which can be configured in the config file).

VTIMEZONE components of calendars are totally ignored at the moment, as are daylight saving times, instead it assumes that the TZID of DTSTART and DTEND properties are valid OlsonDB values, e.g. America/New_York (seems to be the default for at least the calendar applications I tend to use).

To summarize: as long as you are always in the same timezone and your calendar is, too, khal probably shows the right start and end times. Otherwise: Good Luck!

Seriously: be careful when changing timezones and do check if khal shows the correct times anyway (and please report back if it doesn’t).