[Design] [Dogfood] Default TZ and interop

Philippe Bossut pbossut at osafoundation.org
Thu Sep 7 16:52:34 PDT 2006


Hi,

I'm going to make a plea for changing the default behavior we currently 
have (namely, using "floating" TZ) and ask for using the default system 
TZ. I know I'm negating a previous opinion of mine but I just got really 
confused in a recent scenario and think less knowledgeable users will be 
even more confused.

Scenario:
- I received an invite from a 3rd party. This invite showed up as an 
email in my IMAP InBox.
- Chandler correctly detected and parsed the VCALENDAR data
- Las, because I didn't check "Use Timezones" in the view menu, the 
event was displayed using its raw GMT time, i.e., 8 hours ahead, i.e, 
out of view on my calendar...
- For a while, I thought the calendar was broken, I started logging a 
bug and it's only when I read the vcalendar data myself that I realized 
that it was a TZ issue. I turned TZ on in Chandler, set it to PST (which 
it does automatically) and the event displayed in the right place... no 
bug...

Take away: I'm afraid that this scenario will be fairly common with 
initial Chandler users and that it will be counted against us as an 
"Interoperability" issue. The bug is very shallow but since people using 
all the default options will run into it, this is a concern. I think 
default options should be set so that the system "just works" in the 
most common cases.

Proposal: When TZ is not turned on, Chandler should use the current 
system TZ instead of floating as a default. People who wants floating 
(i.e. people moving around across TZ but wanting to maintain their own 
TZ bubble) will have to turn TZ on and set "floating" if they want to.

Thoughts?
- Philippe


More information about the Design mailing list