Re: [FEATURE REQUEST] Timezone support in org-mode datestamps and org-agenda

[Tom Gillespie <tgbugs@gmail.com>]

> In anticipation to add time zones in future, I have added the following
> to the Org timestamp spec (see
> https://orgmode.org/worg/org-syntax.html#Timestamps):
>
> DATE TIME REPEATER-OR-DELAY
>
> TIME (optional)
> An instance of the pattern H:MMREST where H represents a one to two digit number (and can start with 0), and M represents a single digit. REST can contain anything but \n or closing bracket.
>
> Note that REST imply that almost arbitrary suffix can be in TIME without
> braking the existing Org timestamp parsing code.

I'm not sure how I feel about the REST in the grammar, I think it is a
reasonable approach but need to double check. I'm worried that there
can be some nasty interactions with REPEATER-OR-DELAY syntax, but that
may not actually be an issue.

I will note that this doesn't address the issue of syntax for
historical and future dates. For historical dates those almost always
require significant additional metadata to compensate for things like
the julian/gregorian calendar switchover etc. for future dates we may
want to go ahead and specify something beyond YYYY-.

I'm less concerned about the rest of the issues beyond the fact that
adding syntactic support for timezones seems to have opened up
countless usability and bad assumption issues that have been mentioned
elsewhere in the thread.

So, I think the syntax may be ok, but as written I think there can be
quite nasty interactions with REPEATER-OR-DELAY (not to mention what
happens if a delay tries to track across a change in timezones).

Best,
Tom