What is the best available DateTime format that preserves Olson timezone names?
Here's the deal: To create an iCal feed for a various website, I use Plagger and its plugin architecture.
1) script/slims_calendar.pl fetches the Slim's calendar site and scrapes the HTML to get the schedule, prints the date and title to STDOUT as YAML or RSS.
2) Plagger CustomFeed::Script parses the output of the script with Date::Parse, then create a DateTime object.
3) Publish::iCal plugin emits iCal feed using Data::ICal and DateTime::Format::ICal.
The biggest concern here is how to pass Datetime from 1) to 2) while preserving Olson TZ names. Even if I say "hey, here's the schedule with date timezone America/Los_Angeles," if you format the datetime in W3CDTF in the script output, the Olson name is lost in the middle. i.e. When you parse theW3CDTF format, TZ is now OffsetOnly, without the Olson.
Note that it's not a blocker or whatever. Publish::iCal is carefully coded to use the UTC date if the datetime is not flagged with Olson name. And there's also Filter::ForceTimeZone to force set Olson TZ later if you'd like, so it just works with iCal, Google Calendar or Sunbird fine.
But I'm just curious what's the bestway to do round-trip Datetime object and string while preserving Olson timezone names.
