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Zoneless repeating event: occurrences are an hour off after DST, and a title-only --occurrence edit moves the day #590
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Description
Summary
I was working on a project to sync Hey Calendar to a Google Calendar (https://github.com/edooley/hey-gcal) and stumbled across this: for a repeating event saved without a time zone (created in HEY's web app, so starts_at_time_zone is null), occurrences after a daylight saving change are an hour off in two ways:
- Read: the calendar period API behind
hey event week/hey event dayreports them at the series' original UTC time, while HEY's web calendar shows the correct local time. - Write (data change):
hey event edit <series> --occurrence <id> --apply-to currentwith only--titlesaves that UTC-based time, so the meeting moves an hour in HEY's web calendar.
Steps to reproduce
- Use a HEY account and machine in
America/Chicago. - In HEY's web app, create a weekly event "Test" on Wednesday 2026-10-21, 9:00–10:00 AM.
- Run
hey event week 2026-11-04 --json. DST ends on 2026-11-01. - Open HEY's web calendar on 2026-11-04.
- Edit only that day's title:
hey event edit <series> --occurrence <series>_2026-11-04 --apply-to current --title "Test (title-only edit)"
- Run
hey event week 2026-11-04 --jsonagain, and check the web calendar.
Expected
- Steps 3–4: the API and the web calendar agree: 9:00 AM CST,
starts_at=2026-11-04T15:00:00Z. - Step 5: only the title changes. The day stays at 9:00 AM.
Actual
| Step | Source | 2026-11-04 |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | hey event week --json (virtual day) |
14:00:00Z = 8:00 AM CST ❌ |
| 4 | HEY web calendar | 9:00 AM ✅ |
| 5 | hey event edit … --title … response |
starts_at 14:00:00Z, new recording written out ❌ |
| 6 | hey event week --json (written-out day) |
14:00:00Z |
| 6 | HEY web calendar | 8:00 AM: the meeting moved ❌ |
- 2026-10-21, before the DST change, is correct everywhere (
14:00:00Z= 9:00 AM CDT). starts_at_time_zoneisnullon the series, itsparent, every occurrence, and the written-out day.- Zoned events (e.g. invites carrying
America/New_York) are not affected. - Passing the time explicitly (
--start-time 09:00 --end-time 10:00) writes15:00:00Zand fixes the day.
Where it comes from
- Read:
hey-sdk'sCalendarPeriods().Week/.Dayreturn HEY's JSON unchanged, andhey event weekdoesn't modifystarts_at. So the UTC-based time comes from HEY's period API, which disagrees with HEY's web calendar for the same day. - Write:
virtualOccurrence→occurrenceInstants(internal/cmd/events_occurrence.go) rebuilds a virtual day's start from the series. With noStartsAtTimeZoneit usestime.UTC, so the series' 14:00 UTC is kept on 2026-11-04 instead of its 9:00 local wall time. The comments inevents.go/events_zone.goalso describe HEY reading zoneless times as UTC, which matches the API but not the web app.
Suggested fix
- In
occurrenceInstants, expand a zoneless series in the HEY account's zone (accountZone), not UTC, so an edit keeps the day where the web app shows it. Consider refusing the edit when the account has no zone, aswriteZonedoes. - On HEY's side, the period API should expand zoneless series the way the web calendar does, so
starts_atis right for every API client.
Environment
- hey 1.9.0 (main at
02efc42), hey-sdk 0.32.1 - macOS,
America/Chicago - Related but separate: Timed events show on their UTC day, not their local day, west of UTC #585 / Show a timed event on its local day, not its UTC day #563 (which local day an event lands on)
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Keep repeating events at their local time across DST changes