[Evolution-hackers] State of libical (was: pvl_list structure in libical)

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 17:06 -0400, Matthew Barnes wrote:
> I'm debugging some calendar crashers, and my sniffing around has led me
> to the pvl_list data structure in evolution-data-server, located in:
> 
>         calendar/libical/src/libical/pvl.[ch]
> 
> The source code is dated November 1995 and looks to be isolated to
> libical.  It's basically a linked-list of void pointers, and I don't see
> anything useful here that GList doesn't already provide.  Plus, the
> utilization of GSlice for node allocations -- rather than raw
> malloc()/free() calls as pvl_list uses -- might yield a small
> performance improvement.
> 
> I'm tempted to purge it from libical and replace it with a GList
> structure, but first I wanted to check with the upstream maintainers to
> see if they'd accept such a patch.  Are there other issues here that I'm
> not considering, such as API stability?


I withdraw my question, as I didn't realize that libical is (or was) a
stand-alone third-party library with no dependencies on any GNOME APIs.

Can someone educate me as to the current state of libical in E-D-S?  It
appears to be abandoned upstream in favor of the "Free Association"
project (according to [1]), and the source code that appears in E-D-S is
in need of some serious maintenance.

I also tend to think that it could benefit from utilizing GLib for many
aspects that it currently hand-rolls (e.g. data structures, memory
allocation, error handling, etc.) so that's it's more tightly integrated
with the rest of Evolution/GNOME.  If there's interest in seeing this
done then I'd like to volunteer.

[1] http://www.softwarestudio.org/libical/

Matthew Barnes