[Evolution] Calendar status report

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico helixcode com>]

Hello, dear primates,

I apologize for being so slow in keeping up with the calendar for the
last days.  I have been distracted by other tasks.  We are a bit
behind schedule, and it is entirely my fault.  I will do my best to
remedy this situation during the following days.

Seth has done a wonderful job making the calendar a control that is
put in the shell.  It is really cool to have the old gnomecal notebook
inside Evolution.  There are issues to be resolved with the way it
handles views and the menu/toolbar stuff.

Miguel told me that Damon was having trouble compiling the whole of
Evolution; Damon, if this is true, please tell me and I'll be
delighted to give you a hand.  I just rebuilt my whole tree today, and
it seems to work fine.

I am doing some cleanup of historic issues between Wombat
vs. Tlacuache.  I am also trying to fix the day view issues with the
embedded control.  In general, until the end of the week I'll deal
with Bonobo issues on the calendar and the day view integration.

It is very important that we have iCalendar support.  I think we want
to go the way of having a "calendar provider" abstraction.  We would
have one provider for vCalendars and one for iCalendars.  This is more
or less the concept of a "backend" in the addressbook server (it has
nothing to do with the CalBackend concept in the PCS; the latter is
just a loaded calendar object on the server).

Seth, I wonder if you could take a look at how to make different
providers for the calendar.  The in-memory representation in the
server can be our normal iCalObject structure; presumably the
different providers would translate whatever they read into that
structure.

Damon, I need you to tell me if some new calendar view widgets can be
integrated into the main GUI.

I was looking at Outlook a bit, and I think I am going to zorch the
notebook that holds all the views.  Instead we'll have toolbar buttons
that let the user switch between views, which actually are just
different ranges of time that get displayed by the e-day-view or the
upcoming (?) month view.  Outlook's scheme actually makes a lot of
sense, since it lets the user select precisely the range of time he
wants to see, instead of constraining it to days/weeks/months/years.

There is another subtlety when you switch between views.  Right now in
Gnomecal it is a mess, because each view has its own concept of the
"currently shown time".  When you switch views, it can be confusing to
just what time you switched to.  I.e. When you switch from the month
view to the day view, what day should be displayed?

Outlook solves this by having a cursor in all the views.  The cursor
determines the current time.  For example, you can move in the month
view across days with this cursor.  If you switch to the day view, the
cursor's day will be shown.  This is very nice to work with.

I will also start defining the modification log interface for the PCS;
this is needed to support PDA devices that connect from time to time
to the server to synchronize their stuff.

It would be very nice if all the calendar hackers could send in a
little status report to see what everyone is up to.

Again, I apologize for not keeping up with the times.

  Federico