Re: [Evolution] Evolution Bug Day, Take 2

[Damon Chaplin <damon ximian com>]

On Thu, 2001-08-23 at 10:36, Tom Cooper wrote:
> Evolution imported the message correctly for EDT, but Outlook 2000
> running on Windows'98 could not import the appointment directly by
> simply double-clicking on the attachment icon.
>
> "Cannot import vCalendar file.  Could not complete the operation.  One
> or more parameters are not valid"

I've been looking into interoperability with Outlook (2000).
I've found a few problems:

 o Outlook doesn't like UTC offsets which include seconds,
   e.g. TZOFFSETFROM:-040000, even though they are optional
   in the spec. You end up with an appointment miles away from where
   it should be. This is fairly easy to fix.

 o Outlook doesn't like some types of recurrence rules,
   e.g. it doesn't like the BYMONTHDAY part of:
RRULE FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1;BYDAY=SU;BYMONTHDAY=1,2,3,4,5,6,7;BYMONTH=4

   We may be able to rewrite the rules in a different way, or in the
   worst case we can forget about recurrence rules and use specific
   dates. This is a bit of a pain to fix.

 o Outlook uses the WKST, week start day, parameter, which libical
   (the library we use to handle iCalendar) doesn't support in places.
   So I need to fix those.

 o Outlook places the displayable timezone name in the TZID property,
   and puts 'Standard Time' and 'Daylight Time' in the TZNAME
   properties. So in Evolution the timezone will be displayed as
   'Standard Time/Daylight Time' which isn't very useful!
   So we'll have to special-case messages from Outlook and display the
   TZID.

Hopefully once these are done, everything should work smoothly ;)

Damon