Mailing List Archive: DAViCal: General

iCal - partly works now, but...

Index | Next | Previous | View Threaded

joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign

May 6, 2011, 5:10 AM

Post #1 of 9 (443 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but...

Hi,

At the moment I have some major problems that keep me from really using Davical (git version) with iCal (Mac OS X SL, latest version):

1.
I can not invite people from elsewhere.

I can invite ?internal? users now. Users that have an account in Davical. If I use the email-address the event shows up in that users calendar and has to be confirmed.

But if I want to invite my customer that has no account in my Davical (let?s call him ?rich_customer at gmail.foo?) then I get a question mark meaning ?invalid user?. Normaly iCal sends out an email with an attached .ics-file to that email address. While the recipient cannot (dis-)agree on the event that way, at least he gets informed. He can add the event to his personal calendar in his company that way.

Is Davical a server for internal use only?

2.
iCal seems not to notify you if you are invited.

That means: If user1 invites user2, the event appears in user2?s calendar and in the ?events to confirm panel?. Technical perfect.

But: ?normally? (that means: invitations received via good old mail) iCal notifies the user with a bouncing dock icon that there is an invitation that has to be confirmed or rejected. When the invitation is received via Davical, it silently(!) appears in iCal and remains unknown and unreplied until the user looks for them.

3.
When I invite people and they agree, and then I delete the event, iCal asks me if I want to inform the invited people that I cancelled the event. I agree. But the invitees get not the event removed. They get not informed at all. Nothing happens.

Is someone out there using the combination(!) Davical/iCal in an enterprise environment and would declare it ?production stable??

I don?t want to sound unfriendly, I think iCal is the problem. But my impression at the moment is that we would lose loads of totally basic features when migrating from WebDAV to Davical while winning only a single one: The ability to shared-write calendars. Which would be great, but not for that price.

Unfortunately moving away from iCal is not an option for us.

Bye,
J?rg

keith.smith at keiths-place

May 6, 2011, 8:02 AM

Post #2 of 9 (430 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

On 6 May 2011, at 13:10, J?rg Ro?deutscher wrote:

> 1. I can not invite people from elsewhere.
> 2. iCal seems not to notify you if you are invited.
> 3. When I invite people and they agree, and then I delete the event, iCal asks me if I want to inform the invited people that I cancelled the event. I agree. But the invitees get not the event removed. They get not informed at all. Nothing happens.

Actually, I am having these exact problems too. Looking forward to answers on-list please.

Regards,
Keith.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 3749 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.davical.org/pipermail/davical-users/attachments/20110506/b75950a3/attachment-0001.bin>
-------------- next part --------------

andrew at morphoss

May 9, 2011, 4:09 AM

Post #3 of 9 (431 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 14:10 +0200, J?rg Ro?deutscher wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At the moment I have some major problems that keep me from really
> using Davical (git version) with iCal (Mac OS X SL, latest version):
>
>
>
> 1.
> I can not invite people from elsewhere.
>
> I can invite ?internal? users now. Users that have an account in
> Davical. If I use the email-address the event shows up in that users
> calendar and has to be confirmed.
>
> But if I want to invite my customer that has no account in my Davical
> (let?s call him ?rich_customer at gmail.foo?) then I get a question mark
> meaning ?invalid user?. Normaly iCal sends out an email with an
> attached .ics-file to that email address. While the recipient cannot
> (dis-)agree on the event that way, at least he gets informed. He can
> add the event to his personal calendar in his company that way.
>
> Is Davical a server for internal use only?

No, but the protocol is in transition.

Once upon a time there was no expectation that a calendar server would
handle invitations, and as a result the calendar clients sent e-mail
invitations. And all was OK, although there were a variety of problems
and so maybe not quite *everything* was OK.

More recently a draft protocol has been proposed to allow calendar
clients to have inboxes and outboxes and to send / receive invitations
without having to implement it internally.

The draft specification also specifies things about free/busy lookup and
so forth.

At present DAViCal has implemented some parts of this draft, but not
*all* parts of it. The draft is still a draft, but Apple has
implemented much of it in iCal.

This is problematic. If we support freebusy lookup then we want to say
so, but if we don't support everything else, then maybe we'd rather not
advertise support for that, so the server is kind of stuck for an
answer.

Finding time to implement the final parts of the prototcol are probably
the reason why there hasn't been a release of DAViCal for a wee while.
I always think I'll have time Real Soon Now to finish this, and then I
get a long complicated e-mail from someone and it takes me a day or two
to write the answer, and then my kids want me to go for a walk with them
or something. Fundamentally I am not good at release management and
could really do with some help deciding (a) what to do next, and (b) it
is time to release.

Not having to figure out how to pay for their education would also be
nice, but if the worst comes to the worst I can always close my ears to
the clamouring free software hordes for a few years and put on a suit
and go get a real job - it would hurt, but we can hope I would manage to
keep it down to a couple of years :-)

I've been believing that the draft scheduling spec would be ratified in
the next three months for nearly two years now, so I don't want to say
it will be ratified soon. I don't think the final version will vary
much from what we have at present though, but real life has interrupted
me fairly thoroughly right now.

I have seen some indication that we might see an implementation from
another contributor coming soon, but I don't want to hold my breath.

Cheers,
Andrew.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
andrew (AT) morphoss (DOT) com +64(272)DEBIAN
Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake?
-- John Heywood

------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.davical.org/pipermail/davical-users/attachments/20110509/8d285180/attachment.pgp>
-------------- next part --------------

joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign

May 12, 2011, 1:44 AM

Post #4 of 9 (434 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

Hello Andrew,

Am 09.05.2011 um 13:09 schrieb Andrew McMillan:

> Finding time to implement the final parts of the prototcol are probably
> the reason why there hasn't been a release of DAViCal for a wee while.
> I always think I'll have time Real Soon Now to finish this, and then I
> get a long complicated e-mail from someone and it takes me a day or two
> to write the answer, and then my kids want me to go for a walk with them
> or something. Fundamentally I am not good at release management and
> could really do with some help deciding (a) what to do next, and (b) it
> is time to release.

Thanks a lot for your answer. I can understand that very good, often I am in the same situation. So, please understand that I don?t want to criticise you or your software. Hey, it?s Free Software. I know it?s not compatible to having children.? ;-)

My problem is possibly this:
While I am also a Free Software Developer for fun, being here and looking for a good calendar server for this company is not for fun, it?s for job, and I have spent about ~8 hours without a result.

One might ask why someone is taking such a long time getting Davicval running.
Well, that?s the way it is always. In 11 years of webcoding I never found a software that works /only/ with postgres, so I don?t know about postgres like I know about mysql. So I have to install postgres. Then I look for something like phpMyAdmin, found phppgadmin and finding it NOT working with debian due paranoia. Then php modules are missing that Davicval needed (Knowing about many changes in Davical I decided to start with the version from git, so no package dependencies?). And. Then. This. And That. Getting a second computer to have someone to invite. Day 1 is over.

I gave Davical two tries in the last years, and both times it just was not ?company ready?. Again, please, I don?t want to moan, it?s just a matter of fact: If I cannot invite a customer to a meeting, if cancelled events don?t disappear at my colleagues calendar, if there is no notification about events,? then we just can?t use it in a company. For some reasons we are bound to iCal (All CEOs use iPhones that are bound to ?the Apple way?, design addicted users don?t accept ?ugly stuff? like Thunderbird,?) and cannot, like at home ?just try Sunbird, maybe /that/ client works better?? ;-)

So, from my point of view, it would be great to see what works (and what does not) _before_ one even starts to implement the software. It would be great to have a table, for example in the wiki, that says:
Client X on Operating System Y can: Invite, Notify, FreeBusy
Client Z on OS A can do: Making coffee, NOT invite people, drinking coffee all alone
Client B on?

So, from my position, atm not the software is the problem. Looking for a software and ruling out some products for ?not doing this and that? is quite normal. The problem is missing documentation that clearly keeps admins from trying Davical when needing a specific feature it does not have. My impression at the beginning was ?Hey, works with iCal! You configure it that way (screenshot), and everything is fine?. At the end it was not fine.

I would be happy to list what works and what not on iCal/Mac OS X:

iCal 4.0.4 (Mac OS 10.6/Snow Leopard):

Works:
Putting a Calendar on the server
Putting the Addressbook on the server (not really tested: It seems others can read that calendar, changes are notified)
Inviting people *that have an account* to an event

Works not:
Cancelling events. Invitees are not notified and keep the event in their calendar.
iCal notification on events. iCal does not i.e. ring a bell when a person is invited. It just silently waits for accept/reject.

Thanks four your good work. It will be feature complete one day. ;-)

Bye,
J?rg

--

J?rg Ro?deutscher
IT Director

Factor Design AG
Schulterblatt 58
20357 Hamburg
Germany

T +49.40.432 571-43
F +49.40.432 571-99
E-mail: joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign.com

http://www.factordesign.com

Factor Design AG
HRB 73798
Amtsgericht Hamburg

Vorstand:
Uwe Melichar,
Olaf Stein

Aufsichtsratsvorsitzende:
Elke Wohlrab-Haug

joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign

May 16, 2011, 8:49 AM

Post #5 of 9 (435 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

Hi,

Am 06.05.2011 um 17:02 schrieb Keith Smith:

>
> On 6 May 2011, at 13:10, J?rg Ro?deutscher wrote:
>
>> 1. I can not invite people from elsewhere.
>> 2. iCal seems not to notify you if you are invited.

>> 3. When I invite people and they agree, and then I delete the event, iCal asks me if I want to inform the invited people that I cancelled the event. I agree. But the invitees get not the event removed. They get not informed at all. Nothing happens.
>
> Actually, I am having these exact problems too. Looking forward to answers on-list please.

At the moment I am thinking of using Davical for some Calendars, while I stuck with our old system with other ones.

While 1 and 2 would not be such a big problem then, 3 is a stopper.

Question:
Is it
?just a small bug. A fix is on its way/planned this month/already in developer/??
or
?It?s an implementation problem. Do not hold your breath while waiting for the fix? ?maybe sometime in 2011???
?

Can I help to debug it in iCal 4?

Thinks in advance,
J?rg

mir at datanom

May 16, 2011, 9:09 AM

Post #6 of 9 (430 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

On Mon, 16 May 2011 17:49:34 +0200
J?rg Ro?deutscher <joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign.com> wrote:

> Question:
> Is it
> ?just a small bug. A fix is on its way/planned this month/already in developer/??
> or
> ?It?s an implementation problem. Do not hold your breath while waiting for the fix? ?maybe sometime in 2011???
> ?
>
I recall Andrew mentioning on the list that he did not have access to
an iPhone 4. So the problem could might easily be solved if someone
donated an iPhone 4 to Andrew/the project.

The iPhone 3 support was developed as a result of a company donating
an iPhone 3 to Andrew for having him implement a proper and lasting
patch for Davical.

--
Hilsen/Regards
Michael Rasmussen

Get my public GnuPG keys:
michael <at> rasmussen <dot> cc
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xD3C9A00E
mir <at> datanom <dot> net
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE501F51C
mir <at> miras <dot> org
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE3E80917
--------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.davical.org/pipermail/davical-users/attachments/20110516/2cb68894/attachment.pgp>
-------------- next part --------------

joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign

May 17, 2011, 7:00 AM

Post #7 of 9 (431 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

Hi,

Am 16.05.2011 um 18:09 schrieb Michael Rasmussen:

> On Mon, 16 May 2011 17:49:34 +0200
> J?rg Ro?deutscher <joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign.com> wrote:
>
>> Question:
>> Is it
>> ?just a small bug. A fix is on its way/planned this month/already in developer/??
>> or
>> ?It?s an implementation problem. Do not hold your breath while waiting for the fix? ?maybe sometime in 2011???
>> ?
>>
> I recall Andrew mentioning on the list that he did not have access to
> an iPhone 4. So the problem could might easily be solved if someone
> donated an iPhone 4 to Andrew/the project.

That?s a misunderstanding. ;-)

iCal 4 is part of the regular Mac OS X Desktop 10.6 SnowLeopard.

Possibly it?s on iPhones /also/, I don?t know.

Bye, J?rg

andrew at morphoss

May 17, 2011, 11:19 PM

Post #8 of 9 (431 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 16:00 +0200, J?rg Ro?deutscher wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Am 16.05.2011 um 18:09 schrieb Michael Rasmussen:
>
> > On Mon, 16 May 2011 17:49:34 +0200
> > J?rg Ro?deutscher <joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Question:
> >> Is it
> >> ?just a small bug. A fix is on its way/planned this month/already
> in developer/??
> >> or
> >> ?It?s an implementation problem. Do not hold your breath while
> waiting for the fix? ?maybe sometime in 2011???

There's a stub implementation of much of what is needed in place already
and what it needs is for someone to spend about 3-4 days of
uninterrupted time going through and finishing it. It's a fairly
complex problem, which is why I say "uninterrupted" time.

The specification draft does seem to have stabilised now though, which
is something...

I don't have any tame production environments suitable for testing of
appointments though, and at present I have a few other things also
making calls upon my time, and which I hope might generate some income
in due course to free me up for further free software development.

> > I recall Andrew mentioning on the list that he did not have access to
> > an iPhone 4. So the problem could might easily be solved if someone
> > donated an iPhone 4 to Andrew/the project.
>
> That?s a misunderstanding. ;-)
>
> iCal 4 is part of the regular Mac OS X Desktop 10.6 SnowLeopard.
>
> Possibly it?s on iPhones /also/, I don?t know.

I did have an iPhone 3G donated to me some years back, but it's no good
for testing any longer as it doesn't run the latest iOS version, which I
think is what Michael was referring to. I also had a second-hand
PowerMac donated to me by Weta, which was useful in getting some of the
iCal support going, and more recently (though still a couple of years
ago, I think) InternetNZ donated me a Macbook. I think the Macbook is
still upgradeable to current OS versions just fine.

Cheers,
Andrew.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz/ Porirua, New Zealand
Twitter: _karora Phone: +64(272)DEBIAN
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -- Aldous Huxley,
"Proper Studies", 1927

------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.davical.org/pipermail/davical-users/attachments/20110518/4c320493/attachment.pgp>
-------------- next part --------------

joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign

May 18, 2011, 2:55 AM

Post #9 of 9 (430 views)
Permalink

iCal - partly works now, but... [In reply to]

Hello,

Thanks for replying.

Am 18.05.2011 um 08:19 schrieb Andrew McMillan:

> On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 16:00 +0200, J?rg Ro?deutscher wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Am 16.05.2011 um 18:09 schrieb Michael Rasmussen:
>>
>>> On Mon, 16 May 2011 17:49:34 +0200
>>> J?rg Ro?deutscher <joerg.rossdeutscher at factordesign.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Question:
>>>> Is it
>>>> ?just a small bug. A fix is on its way/planned this month/already
>> in developer/??
>>>> or
>>>> ?It?s an implementation problem. Do not hold your breath while
>> waiting for the fix? ?maybe sometime in 2011???
>
> There's a stub implementation of much of what is needed in place already
> and what it needs is for someone to spend about 3-4 days of
> uninterrupted time going through and finishing it. It's a fairly
> complex problem, which is why I say "uninterrupted" time.

OK, I understand. From what I read this Drafts must be pure hell. I had believed quickly setting up a company calendar would be an easy thing? That was wrong. For years. ;-)

> I did have an iPhone 3G donated to me some years back, but it's no good
> for testing any longer as it doesn't run the latest iOS version, which I
> think is what Michael was referring to.

I use an Android device, and there?s an eclipse extension containing an emulator loaded with everything a google phone contains. So I looked at the iPhone-Emulator in XCode if this could possibly help you - just to find out these guys stripped off ANY app except the Safari webbrowser. Uh. What?s wrong with these guys? Apple? Hello? Crazy...

For Mac OS X:
I had some success hacking a fully licensed OS X client to run in vmware Fusion for Mac. This is something Apple and Vmware want to be impossible, however, some signature patches make the client version look like the server (virtualisation of the server is ?allowed?). Maybe this works under a different OS also.
Possibly for a developer this is the better way, compared to buy apples shiny new toys every year just to get the new calendar client?

Bye, J?rg

Index | Next | Previous | View Threaded

Interested in having your list archived? Contact Gossamer Threads