Re: Status google calendar sync

[Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 722 bytes --]

Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com> writes:
> Philipp Haselwarter <philipp.haselwarter@gmx.de> wrote:

Nick & Philipp,

>> Unfortunately, both the awk script and the org-export-icalendar seem to
>> have quite a hard time with repeating entries.

Yes.  I have extended my awk script to cater for ical events that span
days which does appear to work (to some degree).  See updated version
attached.  This does not handle generic repeated events unfortunately,
but mostly because I'm not sure what the ical format for these might be
(and have been too lazy to look into it).  If you have a good example
(or set of examples) of ical calendar entries that describe repeated
events, I'm happy to work on the awk script further.


[-- Attachment #2: ical 2 org awk script --]
[-- Type: application/x-awk, Size: 7490 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: Type: text/plain, Size: 2187 bytes --]


[...]

> I agree - I have been thinking (unfortunately mostly only thinking)
> about it and it seems to me that many of the pieces are there, but there
> is a non-trivial amount of work to do this and do it right:
>
> o icalendar.el should be the basis of this, but unfortunately, it is too
>   closely tied to the diary (and is incomplete or buggy in various
> ways).

it would indeed be nice to have an Emacs solution to the google -> org
step.

[...]

> o These converters are ripe for what Kernighan and Plauger call a
>   "left-corner" development approach: just bite the smallest useful
>   subset and add features as needed, deliberately and carefully. Both
>   the current implementation of org-icalendar and Eric F.'s awk script
>   would be useful in this respect: they basically cover the basic
>   functionality needed (but perhaps not completely, as Philipp points
>   out).

In some sense, this is indeed my modus operandum but it's not
necessarily the best approach after a while...

> BTW, the reason I've become interested in this is that recently I
> started being bombarded with meeting invitations generated from (what
> else?) M$ Outlook. My former method of adding the invitations to my
> Org

yes, I am seeing the same thing; I would love to have an automated or
semi-automated procedure to take these things in gnus and create a
capture event.  I look forward to seeing what you have been up to in
this respect!

[...]

> turns-you-to-stone-if-you-look-at-it-ugly) and there are bugs (the most
> serious of which is the icalendar timezone stuff that I referred to in a
> recent thread). I'm trying to fixg the bugs and am working on the
> back-end usability stuff in order to survive the onslaught - but the
> icalendar stuff in the middle is likely to remain unspeakably ugly in
> the foreseeable future - I just have no time for it.

time zones are a nightmare, especially with respect to Google.

> So if anybody is interested, I hope this is useful as a starting
> point.

Very interested and happy to contribute as much as I can!

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.50.1
: using Org-mode version 7.5 (release_7.5.391.gfaccb.dirty)