Re: sync birthdays?

[Nathan Owens <pianocomp81 yahoo com>]

--- Matt Davey <mcdavey mrao cam ac uk> wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 14:47 -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> > Hi gnome-piloteers,
> > 
> > I've recently realized I'd better implement a birthday-memory-supplement
> > in my personal life.  So I would like to sync birthdays between my palm
> > (T|X) and evolution (2.8.1) using gnome-pilot 2.0.14 and pilot=link
> > 0.12.1.   This is all on ubuntu edgy, using the official edgy packages,
> > though the system has a couple of other feisty packages; syncing is over
> > wireless or bluetooth (usb sync didn't work, as discussed some months
> > ago on this list).
> 
> I've made available some unofficial edgy packages that fix at least some
> of the timing problems with USB syncing:
> http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mcdavey/downloads/
> 
> >   As far as I can tell the birthday information
> > doesn't get synced along with the rest of the contact info.  Am I right
> > about this?  Is there an upgrade to pilot-link, gnome-pilot, and/or
> > evolution that can fix the issue?
> 
> As you probably know, the birthday field and a few others were
> introduced in the OS5 release.  The recently released pilot-link 0.12
> provides some library-level support for parsing the new fields but this
> support is, I believe, somewhat beta.  David, do you want to comment?
> 
> The Evolution conduit needs to be updated to support the new fields,
> however.  The evo-conduits could do with some love, really.  I find the
> addresses sync gets very confused with first/last name mapping ever
> since Evo decided to attempt to map "full names" to first/last names
> automagically.  Disaster.  I haven't looked at the evo data structures,
> but I presume sanity can be restored.... Volunteers are welcome.

I hadn't realized that the Contacts database was supported in pilot-link 0.12. I might be able to
a look at the Evolution Addressbook conduit, but I can't promise anything - I'm working full time
and also starting a Master's program next week. Evolution does support birthdays (and just about
everything else the Palm supports), so only the conduit needs to be updated.

With regard to the addressbook conduit itself - it needs help. The names problem/bug can't really
be avoided since PalmOS doesn't have a Middle or Suffix field while Evolution does. There's a lot
of room for improvement. I'm hoping it won't require a full rewrite, as rewrites can produce more
bugs than they fix. It's also very easy to get things out of sync because of incompatible fields.

The other conduits aren't in too bad of shape and can be updated with relative-ease once
pilot-link is updated. They have a few bugs regarding duplicates and categories, but those are
fixable.

David: what's the status of the other OS5 databases? Is there some preliminary source gnome-pilot
and Evolution developers can get so the conduits can be updated?

As Matt said: volunteers are welcome.

Nathan



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