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> scheduled video calls take place in physical places

have you ever travelled and had to join the call from a different country, different time zone? the calendars usually help you to translate the call's timezone to your local timezone, but they only can do that if they can determine the offsets.

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Just convert using most up-to-date source time zone into UTC, then proceed as usual. The point is that the event is not actually fixed in time, but affected by local law that can arbitrarily move times of all scheduled meetings by an hour or so.

It would be nice if get get rid of DST so that we wouldn't have to special case situations that only happen once every half century, though.

Yeah so you determine the offset at display time. Store “Europe/Amsterdam”, not “UTC+1” so that if Amsterdam (or likelier, the Netherlands) decides to shift timezone or move the DST change dates or something insane like that, before the event occurs, you can trivially take that into account by updating to the newest tzdata file.

Converting from timezone to offset is a lossy conversion.

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