[emacs-wiki-discuss] Planner & ical

[Jose E. Marchesi]

This is my first post to the list, so i think i should present myself
to the emacs-wiki & planner community: hi! :)

Next... the interesting issues. I have been playing a bit with planner
+ calendar.el + icalendar.el + eldav.el (webdav support) + bbdb in
order to sync data with openexchange servers. I had some success
synchronizing appointments via webdav using the ical<=>diary functions
from icalendar.el. But actually there are many backwards: ical support
on icalendar.el is quite limited. The icalendar-import-* routines
generate diary entries, but these entries are not merged with the
existing ones, but just appended (support for merging diary entries
should be implemented on diary.el, at least under my understanding).

Due to that limitations, i am seriously thinking about to take the
task of normalizing and generalizing the ical support on emacs
(involving the diary, planner and bbdb at least). I am ready to work
on it. But first i would like to hear your impressions and ideas about
the issue.

I propose the following hints:

- icalendar.el should implement the whole RFC 2445 (icalendar/vcard
  standard).

- icalendar.el should be able to merge ical files.

- icalendar.el should provide an abstract API to manage the
  information stored on an arbitrary ical file (events, to-do entries,
  journal entries, free/busy time, timezones, alarms, etc).

- Interfaces to other emacs components using icalendar.el should be
  implemented on separated features named `icalendar-bbdb.el',
  `icalendar-diary.el', `icalendar-planner.el', etc. These features
  should use the API exported by `icalendar.el'.

- icalendar.el should not provide any mechanism to transport the
  generated ical buffers. Other features from emacs can do the work
  (tramp, ange-ftp, the webdav implementation of url.el or eldav.el,
  email, etc). 

- The whole thing should be coded in elisp. To use external programs
  such as pim.pl greatly limites the integration with other emacs
  components (to integrate pim.pl with bbdb, for example, whould
  require to hack pim.pl).


What do you think?

-- 
José E. Marchesi     <address@hidden>
                     <address@hidden>

GNU España           http://es.gnu.org
GNU No es Unix!      http://www.gnu.org