Rethinking the KOrganizer reminder daemon

[Volker Krause]

On Samstag, 7. August 2021 12:47:24 CET Volker Krause wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> how we handle event reminders came up in a recent Plasma Mobile calendaring
> discussion, I've tried to put that into a concrete proposal here.
> 
> For KOrganizer event reminders are handled by korgac [1], a 20+ year old
> piece of code. While that works reasonably well from a technical POV,
> there's a number of issues worth addressing IMHO:
> 
> (A) Security/privacy: korgac still has support for iCal alarm types "email"
> and "procedure", something that shouldn't exist in a world of shared
> calendars and iCal invites.
> 
> (B) UX: the main UI is a big dialog popping up in the middle of your screen.
> We nowadays have a much more powerful desktop-wide notification system
> supporting grouping, interaction, priorities and various inhibition
> mechanisms, which would be better suited for this.
> 
> (C) Duplication of the reminder logic with other calendaring apps, see e.g.
> Calindori's implementation [2].
> 
> As a way forward, we could:
> 
> (1) Drop support for iCal alarm types due to their danger, and handle all
> alarms as regular notifications. For the rare cases where people actually
> rely on that functionality KAlarm provides that for local (safe) sources.
> 
> (2) Use KNotification as the main and only UI for reminders. This means in
> order to see event details beyond the title you would need to click on the
> notification to open the calendar app. This also means the suspend option
> would only be able to have an automatic default time (this is the only
> functionality change I'm not entirely sure about, but it matches what is
> usually offered on phones for example). Dismissing/suspending individual or
> all reminders remains possible thanks to notification grouping.
> 
> (3) Base this on Nico's KCalCore plugin work once that becomes available for
> Akonadi as well.
> 
> (4) Standardize the D-Bus interface towards the calendaring app between
> KOrganizer, Calindori and Kalendar.
> 
> (5) Find a way to define a "default calendaring app" (like it's done for web
> browsers), so that the reminder daemon doesn't need to hardcode which
> calendaring app to launch. With (3) - (5) we should have all the pieces to
> move towards a single unified reminder daemon that works with all our
> calendaring apps, and works well both on desktop and mobile.
> 
> (4) and (5) could also be beneficial for the Plasma calendar integration.

See https://invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/merge_requests/156

Summary: There's now an implementation combining korgac's reminder logic and 
Calendori's notification-based UI. Ideally this would end up as the shared 
reminder daemon in one of the common calendaring infrastructure repos and 
replace korgac. Details on what that means for interfacing with calendaring 
apps are discussed in the MR.

Regards,
Volker
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