I'm really pleased with how libical does the heavy lifting for me here. It
has improved greatly since the old days when we were its caretakers. Comparing
two timestamps that are in different time zones actually works. I don't know
how it works, but it works. Just to make sure it wasn't just using "the local
time zone" when not told to use UTC, I created an event that included a
completely
fictional time zone, then set the host's local time zone to a different one,
and the compare function still worked.
Then I found a function to tell me what the time zone ID of a time stamp
is; lo and behold, it showed the name of my fictional time zone! Somehow
it's getting back to that data, or it's making another copy of it and embedding
it in the timestamp, or something. Either way it removes a LOT of work from
what I have to do, and it saves me from having to go with the less-than-pretty
method of converting everything to UTC at the last moment.
