[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Discussion of a possible project - offline calendar project

[From: Patrick Ohly]

On Tue, 2007-01-16 at 09:05 +0100, Jose Manrique Lopez de la Fuente
wrote:
> Just an idea/plan:
> 
> FIRST STAGE (alpha version)
> 1) Create a pytgtk app that asks the user for its google-calendar
> account details and stores them in the device.
> 2) When internet connection is available (or when user requests it),
> it should download ical files. Perhaps it would be better using some
> kind of sync mechanism to check updates
[...]
> Ideas? Anyone already coding this?

Before you start reinventing sync mechanisms I suggest that you have a
look at the SyncML standard: it already takes care of incremental syncs
with updates, removals and additions being transmitted in both
directions.

There are existing components that could be reused to do exactly what
you want:
      * my SyncEvolution: SyncML client which works with EDS-DBus and
        thus Contacts/Dates
      * sync.scheduleworld.com: is a free (as in beer) SyncML server
        which interfaces with Google calendar

SyncEvolution compiles for the Nokia 770 since 0.4, released on
11.09.2006. I did not announce this more widely because it is still
pretty rough:
      * no GUI, can only be started in an shell
      * one (non-essential) part is a Perl script which complains about
        some missing modules (UTF-8)
      * the showstopper though were performance/timeout issues in the
        EDS-DBus libraries (see below)

> 2007/1/16, Mathias Uebelacker <m.uebelacker at googlemail.com>:
> > By the way, a interface to mobile phones should be included - but thats will
> > be a hard work an should be the second step

If you have a SyncML-capable phone you get this synchronization for
free. The drawback is that usually you will have to synchronize with a
server on the Internet, which might include paying for mobile data
traffic and trusting someone else with your data. The advantage is that
you can sync when away from your PC.

On Tue, 2007-01-16 at 09:41 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> The synchronisation methods in eds-dbus have
> not been tested, but if they are broken they should be trivial to fix.

I was hoping to provide a better bug report on this, but I have been
busy with other stuff until the holidays and then found that Scratchbox
currently doesn't work for me due to a 2.6.18 kernel, so I couldn't
gather more information.

Anyway, the problem is that after downloading >200 contacts into the
Nokia 770 e_book_get_contacts() fails with a timeout error. I was able
to work around that by using e_book_async_get_contacts(), only to find
that now e_book_get_changes() suffers from the same problem. I suspect
that it is a DBus method call which is expected to complete more quickly
than it really does.

I googled around a bit and found some references to similar problems,
but no solution that would work without recompiling the code which calls
libdbus.

Ross, do you have any idea what I could try next, short of recompiling
with EDS-DBus with debug information and stepping through it?

-- 
Bye, Patrick Ohly
--  
Patrick.Ohly at gmx.de
http://www.estamos.de/