Re: Debian calendar, events and more
On 06/02/15 04:44, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 3:06 AM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>
>> Has anybody else ever looked at this concept or know of any existing
>> work in this area other than the events wiki?
> When the Debian events team existed and was maintaining
> www.d.o/events, I filed #645720 requesting an iCal feed for
> www.d.o/events. The team no longer exists and www.d.o/events is dead.
> I think we need a proper Debian calendar service with a team behind
> it, as I have mentioned on the services wishlist. As the events team
> discovered, it is far too much work to manually gather events people
> publish in various random places and publish them so it should be
> something anyone can push events to (via web form, iCalendar feed or
> other method) and should automatically push certain classes of events
> to external calendars like LWN.
>
> https://wiki.debian.org/Services#wishlist
> https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/webwml/webwml/english/events/submit-event-to-lwn?view=markup
>
There are probably a few ways to go about this without a formally
constituted events team:
a) it could be organized like planet.debian.org, people with commit
access could put iCalendar files or links to their own hosted calendars
into a VCS. Some script could aggregate and try to filter the content
and serve it up in various ways for everybody else to consume. This
could be quite ad-hoc but with minimal central management required.
b) we could ask DSA to host a CalDAV server such as DAViCal[1]. Each
user would have a login and would be able to connect from any CalDAV
client (Evolution, Iceowl, etc) to publish events into one or more
public calendars. The benefit of this is that people can use their GUI
client to insert stuff more easily but it has the disadvantage that it
is an extra thing for DSA to keep running. The public calendars would
then be exposed as read-only iCalendar URLs for non-authenticated users.
c) somebody could make (and support) some centralized database and/or
web-front-end to something like DAViCal. This would mean people could
manage event data through a web form without installing any GUI but it
may require the most dev effort, unless there is already something like
this that can be packaged and deployed easily by DSA.
Whatever strategy was used to gather the data, it would then be possible
to develop some adapter to merge it into the UDD iCalendar feed. If the
data is well structured this wouldn't be hard, e.g. a simple rule would
be to add some URL parameter to select from a set of pre-defined filters
by region or topic.
My own feeling is that we just find a quick way to let people submit
data and then start looking at it and reporting on it to see how people
may want to filter and personalize it.
1. https://packages.debian.org/davical
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