Timezones are an important and at times awkward feature of calendaring. There is no official registry of timezones. The Olson database comes closest. In the Olson database, timezones are named according to their continent and nearest large city, for example America/New_York.
System timezones
Bedework provides a set of timezones, the system timezones, which are available to all users of the system. The distributed system comes with timezones derived from the Olson database but any set of timezones could be used. The administrative application provides a means for replacing the system timezones by uploading an xml formatted data file.
Building timezone information
- Convert the Olson database into a set of ics files. The data is available from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub. vzic, a program available at http://www.dachaplin.dsl.pipex.com/vzic/, can be used to convert the zone information, Download and unpack the latest source and set the appropriate variables:
- OLSON_DIR=wherever the data was unpacked.
- PRODUCT_ID=-//BEDEWORK//NONSGML Bedework Calendar system//US
- TZID_PREFIX=
...