[Kde-pim] Status of calender ical directory resource

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi!

I always liked the approach of the contacts resource, to use a directory of 
vcf files instead of a single file, but found that my calendar was still using a 
single file in the traditional location ~/.kde/share/apps/korganizer/std.ics 
which was about 7 MiB already. I do journal entries in my calendar as well and 
sometimes attach files to appointments I like to include within the calendar 
itself.

I thought that it would be nice to have this as folder of ics files as well. 
And found this to be possible with akonadi_icaldir_resource.

Now I have a few question regarding this:

1) Why isn´t it used? It avoids writing a complete 7 MB file on adding an 
appointment (even if its delayed somewhat by internal caching). I think its 
also safer as modifying an event just write to one single event file and there 
is no risk to loose other events (due to incomplete writing of std.ics file).

2) What is the status of it, is it considered supported and stable? More on my 
findings about this in a moment.

3) Why can I not set a name for it like with ical file resource? I can set a 
name in Korganizer, but not in Akonadiconsole via "Configure Natively". 
Consequently it shows as akonadi_icaldir_resource_0 in Akonadiconsole instead 
of the name I set for it in Korganizer. Is this just a missing feature?



As regarding the stability, I tried to migrate my old calender to the new, as 
I found in Akonadiconsole that I can move or copy items between collections in 
the "Browser" tab.

First I moved on item. It immediately got removed from the std.ics and added 
as libical-file to ~/.local/share/calender directory I selected for it for 
storage.

Then I was bold and moved 10 items. These got removed from std.ics file, but 
only the first of it got added to the calender directory. The others seemed to 
appear in file_db_data and Akonadi displayed the items in the new icaldir 
collection and not in the old one. I waited for minutes, but they didn´t 
appear in the calender folder. I bet this is due to the caching within 
Akonadi, but I expected it to act after 15 minutes or so. For mail folders its 
possible to set a cache policy, I didn´t find it for icaldir resource folder.

Then I was crazy and did Ctrl-A of the 4173 items and moved them all. 
Akonadiconsole was thinking about itself for a while, still then nothing got 
removed from std.ics, and nothing got added to calendar. Well maybe the first 
item got moved, I didn´t check that closely. However items appeared to be 
moved within Akonadiconsole after a while and appeared in file_db_data. Nothing 
seemed to happen for about half an hour of me reading stuff about Akonadi and 
trying to find out more how file_db_data behaves. I was puzzled cause I expected 
Akonadi to at least remove the stuff from std.ics, when it has stored it in 
file_db_data already.

I tried to find ways to trigger any action and did "Synchronize Folder" and 
"Synchronize Folder Recursively" on ical dir resource. It worked a bit, yet 
still no files appeared in calender directory. Then I tried the same to the old 
ical file resource to see whether it removes the stuff from std.ics. It didn´t. 
Instead it appeared to rescan std.ics and added all entries in it to the 
resource again. I think it should have known that I moved them already :).

Then I went bold knowing that nice handy BTRFS snapshot and a manual backup of 
the old std.ics in place and deleted that newly added items to have it 
truncate the the std.ics. This did work.

Yet still in calendar folder no new ical files appeared. Then I read about 
"Clear Akonadi Cache" regarding how to correct incorrect information in some 
mail folders. I wondered already that this may destroy may calender items, but 
tried it nonetheless in the slight hope that clearing akonadi cache would mean 
that icaldir resource takes those file in file_db_data and writes them out in 
the calender directory finally.

Well it didn´t and on Akonadiconsole restart only the few items that Akonadi 
actually really moved were still there.

So it seems that moving items from an ical file resource to an ical dir 
resource is somewhat broken. Is it supposed to work at all?


Then I tried the saner approach of copying the items:

Then quitted Akonadi, made sure mysql got quitted to, was still running after 
akonadictl stop completed with a popup. I bet this might be due to the case I 
had a mysql client running on its socket. I´d expect MySQL to disconnect the 
client in that case.

Put the backup of the std.ics file in place and started Akonadi again. It 
immediately picked up the contents of the file and I had my calender back.

I unselected both calendar resource in Korganizer so it doesn´t get too crazy. 
And then I Ctrl-A on the ical file resource items and just copied them all over 
to the icaldir resource. The copy operation went smoothly and nicely. I told 
Korganizer to display the icaldir resource calender and voila there it was.

I now have a nice:

martin at merkaba:~/.local/share> find calendar -type f | wc -l
4156
martin at merkaba:~/.local/share> du -sh calendar              
21M     calendar

Hmm, du seems to count each file in 4 KiB blocks, unless I use:

martin at merkaba:~/.local/share> du --apparent-size -sh calendar
11M     calendar



Instead of a

martin at merkaba:~/.kde/share/apps/korganizer> ls -l std.ics
-rw-r--r-- 1 martin martin 7540714 Mär 27 13:29 std.ics



I wonder a bit about the size difference tough. Why is the calender folder 11 
MiB instead of about 7 MiB?

Well, I expect this to be some overhead of ical format, header information 
duplicated in each file. I am fine with that.



Another observation: It is a nice idea to disable showing calender items in 
Digital Clock, if I intend to use plasma-desktop during such an operation. It 
was blocked for minutes :)


There are some possible bug reports in there and I am willing to report those, 
just first I wanted to get some feedback about the state of the resource.


I think I did a bit deeper in some stuff and do some more analysis. I saw some 
huge amounts of stat("/etc/localtime")... on each access of a maildir mail file 
or somewhat…


But for now I leave it at that. I will test icaldir resource for now. I am 
quite confident that it will work as contacts resource works nicely as well.

I learned some more about Akonadiconsole and Akonadi behaviour…

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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