Comparing dates problem

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

Hi,

I am writing a reminder program for our Zimbra email client. One of
the requirements I was given was to automatically increment or
decrement the display to show something like the following:

5 minutes until appointment

or

10 minutes past your appointment


Either way, as each minute goes by, I need to increment it or
decrement it. I am having trouble finding a coherent way to take the
same date and compare just the number of minutes between them to find
the difference. Like if I have an appointment at 9:30 a.m. and the app
is loaded at 8 a.m., I need to know the number of minutes or hours and
minutes until the appointment.

I have looked at the dateutils module and it has many comparison
methods, but they seem to only return the number of days or seconds.

Any ideas would be great!

Mike