Re: [Chandler-dev] State of Chandler Calendar Interop

Jeffrey and I chatted on Friday...

In short, there are a couple of small issues we should probably fix  
for 1.0.2 - assuming nothing else major comes up.

Jeffrey also thought we should the announce the Google CalDAV build  
on the users-list for user testing.

(Randy, there is a question for you at the bottom of the email.)

More details below:

On Sep 12, 2008, at 1:31 PM, Mimi Yin wrote:

> UTC is not being displayed correctly
> https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5653
>
> - A number of people have reported this. But it's still unclear to  
> me which calendar clients store their events in UTC. Curiously, the  
> most recent report came from someone subscribing to a Google  
> calendar. I was able to repro the problem (Google calendar events  
> showed up in GMT, even though the calendar on Google is in PST.)  
> However, user replied that the problem went away after a few days!

This issue comes up a lot on the users list. Sometimes it's because  
an user exported their calendar from Palm (which stores time zones in  
UTC). Other times its because Google Calendar is doing weird things  
with time zones.

Either way, the idea behavior would be for Chandler to be smarter  
about translating UTC time zones at the "display" level.

Jeffrey thinks this might be 2-3 hours of work to get right in the  
Calendar View, but how much effort it will take to fix it in the  
Triage List View is an unknown right now.

There is also a bug in the Multi Week View where all-day / anytime  
UTC events are showing up 1 day ahead of schedule. I wonder if it's  
related to this bug: https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi? 
id=12366

> Google and Apple don't inherit to modifications
> https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12277
> - The user impact of this bug sounds pretty serious. However, we  
> haven't heard complaints about it...yet. (It only affects people  
> subscribing to Chandler calendars from Google and Apple iCal, not  
> vice versa.)

Jeffrey estimates that this will require 4-5 hours of work, but it  
pretty important as it results in data loss for anyone subscribed to  
Chandler calendars from Google and Apple iCal and more importantly  
anyone using Google CalDAV with Chandler.

We need to fix this on the server as well. I have logged a bug for  
Randy here: https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12277

>
> Tolerate all-day EXDATE/ RDATE when dtstart is a timed event
> https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12360
> - This is for Palm calendars only? but essentially any Palm  
> calendar with recurrence will barf in Chandler?

10 minute fix. Nominated for 1.0.2

> Support Google's CalDAV implementation
> https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12278
> - Google Calendar comes up a lot. Obviously supporting read-write  
> well would be a big boon. Jeffrey is this something we could try to  
> build volunteer interest around? What's left to do?

Next action: Mimi to test out Google CalDAV branch
I've tested this lightly. Mostly did a lot of recurrence stuff -  
editing and deleting occurrences etc.

- I immediately ran into the "Google and Apple don't inherit to  
modifications" issue above (bug 12277)
- I also had some weird issues with events being deleted in Chandler,  
but no on Google.
- Also, 1 occurrenced ended up being UTC, which made Jeffrey think  
that maybe Google had some UTC bugs.

All in all, I think the CalDAV branch is ready for user testing. I've  
been running my real data on it for the last 24 hours, playing around  
with Google Calendar and haven't had any crashes, tracebacks, etc.

Jeffrey, I think you can send out an email to the users-list and  
mebbe just note the "known issues" and ask people to pay special  
attention to testing recurrence and event deletion?

****
Jeffrey also pointed out 3 additional interop issues that were either  
a lot of work and/or not particularly pressing. I've logged them and  
targeted them to Future.

- Support CTags on the Desktop: https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/ 
show_bug.cgi?id=12370

- Don't support default security authentication method for Apple  
Calendar Server
-- If you are trying to use Chandler Desktop with the Apple CalDAV  
Server, you need to disable authentication on the server. Not really  
a viable hack.
-- https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10191

- Chandler doesn't support "CalDAV user urls" which allow you to find  
all the calendars an user has in their CalDAV account (e.g. on Google  
Calendar).
-- Instead, we need to tell people to subscribe to their Google  
CalDAV calendars 1 at a time
-- Jeffrey thinks this might take quite a bit of work to do.
-- https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12376

Randy, does the server support calendar-home-urls? Meaning, can  
somebody using a different calendar app grab all of their Cosmo  
calendars by pointing to a single URL?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Open Source Applications Foundation "chandler-dev" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-dev