When viewing an email there is a blue box in the top
right corner of
the window. On my system the
date is offset ahead by one hour.
The likely explanation is kmail has not been updated to the newer DST
period. (Why
would kmail use an internal calendar
rather than a system calender?)
Only people affected by the DST nonsense are likely to see this bug.
Would somebody please confirm?
The code for the box display is in tdepim/kmail/headerstyle.cpp. I'm not
a C++ guru but from
what I think I see, the code is pulling the date/time information from
the system. As the time in the clock applet
in my kicker panel is correct, and the date command in konsole is
correct, I don't know how kmail is shifting the
time by one hour, the exact difference of the DST shift last weekend. I
don't see anything obvious in tqdatetime.h or
ntqdatetime.h.
I think I see the problem.
I received some system emails from another box in my network. The time in
the box was the same as the current time. Curious, I then looked at emails
received from other people and from before the DST shift Nov. 4. The times
in the box from emails from before the DST shift are two hours ahead of
the current time.
Focusing about what might be happening, and based upon what I see, I'm
guessing the box is conveying the current time of the sender relative to
the current time of the recipient's machine. Seems like a half-decent
intent.
Yet if that is the case, then the problem is the box text. The text string
"Now" is misleading. The box should be revised from "Now:" to
"Sender's
Current Time:."
Even then, the time will be skewered across DST shifts because when I view
an email from two weeks ago, before the Nov. 4 shift, the box says the
time is two hours ahead, which is incorrect.
Any ideas for an optimal way to fix this misleading text?
Darrell
The box is also messed up even further in that it is not updated if the
Email is left up on the screen; the Email has to be reloaded in order to
update the "Now" box with the current date/time of the sender. It also
has a tendency to truncate text if the date string grows too long.
I don't remember exactly when/where this "feature" was introduced, but I
am pretty sure it was either from OpenSUSE or the kdepim enterprise
branch. Someone had half a good idea but didn't implement it correctly.
:-)
Tim
