GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 97710
incorrect date/time displayed in the header pane
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Problem: Pan displays the incorrect date/time in the header pane for messages with timezone information. It seems that for instance the "-0800" is ignored when calculating the date in the header pane. Desired behavior: Pan should account for timezone information when computing dates/times for the header pane. Steps to cause problem: * I used Pan to post a message to a newsgroup at 12:30am (Pacific Time) on Tuesday, Nov. 5th. My computer's clock is set to the correct time, and its time zone is set to Pacific Time. * When Pan retrieved the new message listing, it showed my message in the header pane. However, the date shown in the header pane was "11.04 16:30". The message was sorted in the header pane by this displayed date. * However, when I click on the message to display it, it shows the correct date at the top of the "body" pane. (Tue, 05 Nov 2002 00:30:28 -0800). * I noticed that other messages in the same newsgroup with the -0800 format also had their times displayed incorrectly in the header pane. However, times with a format like "Tue, 05 Nov 2002 05:27:30 +0000 (UTC)" show the correct time in the header pane.
Chris: This looks like a duplicate of #95343, which you fixed in 0.13.2. Could you confirm/refute this? Will: FWIW, the header pane dates look correct in 0.13.2.91, which is what I'm using. I repeated your steps -- for my own timezone -- and the header & body panes were in step with one another.
Charles: I don't think this is a dupe #95343, which was related to a default US date format which confused a non-US user. In this report, the date clearly is wrong (and the user's in the US). However, like you I can't reproduce this in 0.13.2.91. wsr23: can you reproduce this in 0.13.2.91?
Unfortunately, yes, I can reproduce this in 0.13.2.91. Here are the steps I took: * Downloaded the 0.13.2.91-nospell1 rpm from the superpimp.org site. * Installed it with rpm -Uvh. * Ran pan and went to Help...About to ensure that it was version 0.13.2.91-nospell1. * Posted a message to alt.test. The clock in the bottom-left of the screen said "7:06 PM". * Waited a minute, then grabbed new headers for alt.test. * Found my message. In the header pane, the Date field of my message displayed 11:06:52 AM. * Clicked on my message. In the message pane, the date shows up (correctly AFAIK) as: Sun, 08 Dec 2002 19:06:52 -0800 So it's the same problem I was having before. Thanks for looking into this... I'll feel really bad if it's just something configured wrong in my own system. Just FYI, the "System Clock Uses UTC" option in the RH 8.0 time adjustment panel's Time Zones view is NOT checked on my system. (It was unchecked by default, and I've left it that way). I haven't seen any other relevant options. Please let me know if there are any other steps I can take to help track this down!
Reopening. Didn't know if I was supposed to do this myself before, but I figured it couldn't hurt...
fejj: this looks like a gmime issue, specifically g_mime_utils_header_decode_date(). That function tokenizes the date using datetok(), which chokes on the negative timezone offset ('-0800'), because of this: for (end = start; *end && !strchr ("-/,\t\r\n ", *end); end++) { datetok() ignores the '-', ending up with an offset of '0800', which is then ignored, so the date is returned as if in GMT. Why do we ignore the '-' ?
yea, I actually noticed this a few days ago when someone asked me about my date tokeniser :-) the - was for "05-02-2002" type date formats. anyways, I have fixed it in gmime cvs so syncing up with gmime-utils.c should fix it.
Fixed in CVS for 0.13.3: http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/cvsview2.cgi?diff_mode=context&whitespace_mode=show&subdir=pan/gmime&command=DIFF_FRAMESET&file=gmime-utils.c&rev1=1.34&rev2=1.35&root=/cvs/gnome
*** Bug 118975 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***