On 22 Jul 2010 00:21:30 +0200, "Sven Bretfeld" <sven.bretfeld@gmx.ch> wrote:

[I've pruned the CC list, by the way]

[...]

> There is something strange. Having installed the org version from git
> and having set org-icalendar-alarm-time to 10, GoogleCalendar displays
> appointments two hours too late. 
> 
> Strangely, the ics files produced with both versions are exactly the
> same (including the headers) with exception of the VALARM lines. Here is
> an example:

[...]

> A timezone issue? But how, if both files are identical in the essential
> parts? 
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Sven

Sven,

unfortunately, I really have no idea what is going on here.  I'm not
really that conversant with the full iCalendar specifications although
I have read the relevant parts of the specification [1] and I think
I've got things right.  

However, my experience with Google's calendar has left me less than
impressed.  There seem to be quite a few idiosyncrasies (I'm trying to
be polite here ;-) in what Google is doing and I have a feeling that
the bug may be there?

Does the 2 hour time shift you find correspond to your time zone
relative to UTC?  It could be that when google processes the VALARM
element, it wipes out the time zone information for the whole entry
and treats it as UTC when inserting it.

Sorry I can't be of much help.

eric

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt