[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] SyncEvolution + EDS-DBus (was: Re: Discussion of a possible project - offline calendar project)

[From: Patrick Ohly]

On Tue, 2007-01-16 at 22:23 +0100, Patrick Ohly wrote:
[syncing offline calendar with Google Calendar]
> 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)

Here's a summary of the current status: the timeouts that I observed for
a large address book can be avoided by using the async versions of the
calls. e_book_async_get_changes() is not documented in older versions of
the library and missing on the Evolution documtation web site, but it
exists.

e_book_async_get_changes() is needed by SyncEvolution for incremental
synchronizations. Unfortunately it just crashes. One can force it to
always do a slow sync (and risk duplicates in doing so...), but it will
still crash at the end because then it calls e_book_async_get_changes()
to move the change tracker forward.

I debugged this with Ross over the weekend: it seems like an update of
the address book libraries will be needed to fix this, but it's not
clear yet how. On the IT2006 image the server also needs to be updated
because of a change in the DBus interface between it and the library;
whether that can be avoided by patching the IT2006 version of the
library remains to be seen. Stay tuned...

Disclaimer: my recent interest in getting SyncEvolution working is not
motivated by the Nokia 800 developer program ;-) I restarted that effort
already during the holidays, before the program was announced. However,
should someone at Nokia consider SyncML support on the 800 important
enough to invite me, then I'd be happy to participate in the program and
ensure that SyncEvolution works there properly.

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