Re: gnus-icalendar errors in emacs 24.5

[Kostas Zorbadelos]

Lars,

thank you so much. The problem is indeed my Greek locale that causes
failure in date-to-time().
I made the following patch

--- gnus-icalendar.el.orig      2016-02-23 09:04:49.755027543 +0200
+++ gnus-icalendar.el   2016-02-23 10:57:03.759362183 +0200
@@ -389,10 +389,10 @@
   "Build `org-mode' timestamp from EVENT start/end dates and recurrence info."
   (let* ((start (gnus-icalendar-event:start-time event))
          (end (gnus-icalendar-event:end-time event))
-         (start-date (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %a" start))
+         (start-date (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%dT%T%z" start))
          (start-time (format-time-string "%H:%M" start))
          (start-at-midnight (string= start-time "00:00"))
-         (end-date (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %a" end))
+         (end-date (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%dT%T%z" end))
          (end-time (format-time-string "%H:%M" end))
          (end-at-midnight (string= end-time "00:00"))
          (start-end-date-diff (/ (float-time (time-subtract

that seems to work. Jan, as the author has the final saying in this,
hopefully it doesn't break anything else, or there is just a better
solution. Hopefully it will be fixed in later versions of Emacs. 
Again, thanks, it is a pleasure to finally get rid of Thunderbird and
have a plain text calendaring that works.

Regards,
Kostas

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <lmi@gnus.org> writes:

> Kostas Zorbadelos <kzorba@otenet.gr> writes:
>
>> Org file exists and has a 'Calendar' headline.
>> On export of a calendar mail (attached the calendar MIME part) I get the
>> attached backtrace. I get the same backtrace even when I send a gmail
>> calendar invitation. Any suggestions?
>
> [...]
>
>> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (error "Invalid date: 2016-02-25 Πεμ")
>>   signal(error ("Invalid date: 2016-02-25 Πεμ"))
>>   error("Invalid date: %s" "2016-02-25 Πεμ")
>>  date-to-time("2016-02-25 Πεμ")
>
> This is definitely a bug, and it comes from here:
>
> (cl-defmethod gnus-icalendar-event:org-timestamp ((event 
> gnus-icalendar-event))
>   "Build `org-mode' timestamp from EVENT start/end dates and recurrence info."
>   (let* ((start (gnus-icalendar-event:start-time event))
>          (end (gnus-icalendar-event:end-time event))
>          (start-date (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %a" start))
>
> %a is the locale's day name, and that's not something `date-to-time' can
> parse.  But I'm not familiar with gnus-icalendar, so I'm not sure what
> the right fix is here.
>
> Jan, is the week day supposed to be in these date strings at all?

-- 
Kostas Zorbadelos       http://gr.linkedin.com/in/kzorba