[Kde-pim] Alternative calendar dates

[Dotan Cohen]

> There's two methods for displaying holidays in KOrganizer, neither of which
> uses the files from the BSD calendar command.
>

That is good to know!


> The first is the KDE KHolidays holiday region files which up to now have only
> supported the Gregorian calendar system.  These are also used in the Plasma
> panel clock.  You can find this at
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kholidays/
>

Thanks.

> The second is using a plugin, in this case the Jewish Calendar plugin, which
> has it's own code to calculate the holidays.  You can find the plugin at
> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdepim/korganizer/plugins/hebrew/ especially
> the holiday.cpp file that has a giant case statement for each day of the
> Jewish year to determine if it's a holiday or not.  Note this code is
> completely independent of the KCalendarSystem Hebrew calendar implementation
> and is implemented with Nissan = month 1 rather than Tishrei = month 1 as
> KCalendarSystem does, but I'm not sure if that causes issues or not as the
> formulas used are different.
>

I see that you are aware that Nissan=1 is wrong today (and for
thousands of years), in exactly the same way as calling March=1 of
Gregorian is wrong (Ever wonder why the ninth month is called
September, sept=7, the tenth month is called October, oct=8, and so on
for November and December).


> For 4.5 however things are changing.  The KDE holiday region files now support
> any KDE calendar system, including Hebrew, so I will be adding new separate
> files for the Israeli civil holidays and Jewish religious holidays in both
> English and Hebrew.  We can even have separate files for Orthodox and Western
> holidays if needed.  I need to get moving with those files, any help would be
> appreciated :-)
>

You have your man! Shall I write to you off-list on the topic?


> Eventually we will be able to drop the KOrganizer Jewish calendar plugin, once
> KOrganizer supports setting multiple holiday regions, and setting an
> alternative/second calendar system to be displayed in the date cells.
>

Please do so in a fashion that does not make KDE 4.X unusable for
users of that plugin, as was the case when Kaddressbook was rewriten
and many features were missing. Many people depend on that plugin, in
fact for at least two users it was the reason that they moved to KDE
in the first place.


> Longer term, the plan is to create a new XML holiday file format standardised
> by freedesktop.org so there's only a single set of files shared and maintained
> by everyone.  This format would support all calendar systems, complex
> calculations, and proper translation.
>

I see no mention of that file format. Can you please link?


> A quick look at the BSD calendar file format at http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-
> bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/calendar/ shows it's completely incapable of supporting
> any complex rules and so needs updating every year, and I've never heard of it
> being used anywhere else.

Its future is being discussed now on the Israeli LUG list.


> Most other programs just use iCal files, usually
> the Mozilla ones (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/holidays.html), but
> they only support Gregorian so also need updating yearly so are not an ideal
> solution.

Thanks for that link!


> I doubt the BSD files are worth maintaining, but it might be useful
> to add support for reading the files into KHolidays at a later date.
>

I doubt that it will be necessary to add support for them later. We
can simply move onto the new, from what I gather.

-- 
Dotan Cohen

http://bido.com
http://what-is-what.com
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