ics file of Loco Calendar does not contain timezone data

[Joel Addison]

The .ics files created by the loco-directory do not seem to contain any timezone data. When importing such a file into Thunderbird (and other systems as well, as far as I know), the current ics file works fine if the events are all in the user's local timezone, but does not work properly for meetings that are in UTC time.

An example of this is importing a .ics file into Thunderbird. The meetings are shown in the calendar at the time they are entered on loco.ubuntu.com, but this time is not adjusted to turn the UTC time into the user's local time. A meeting for Ubuntu-AU is entered on the website as starting at 10:00am UTC, which is 8:00pm AEST. The meeting comes up in Thunderbird at 10am, even though Thunderbird is set up to use AEST. This is quite annoying, as I would like to subscribe to the calendar in Thunderbird and have it show the events in my timezone at the correct time.

To fix this problem, the character 'Z' can be added at the end of all dates and times that are in UTC when the .ics file is created. This allows the program (Thunderbird in this case) to know the time is in UTC and not the user's local timezone. Thunderbird will then adjust the event times to be in the user's local time zone when showing them on the calendar, instead of just showing them at the time they are scheduled.

I think this would also help out with Bug 711754 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/loco-directory/+bug/711754), as people could subscribe to the calendar in a program to get the events in their own time zone.