[RFC] [WIP] Creating icalendar event invitations

[RFC] [WIP] Creating icalendar event invitations

[Ferdinand Pieper]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1529 bytes --]

Hi all,

gnus has good support to accept/decline icalendar invitations with 
gnus-icalendar.el. I'm looking to extend this to also allow the 
creation of new invitations from within gnus.
Below is a first rough implementation which I for now kept in a 
separate file from gnus-icalendar.el, but the goal would be for 
the code to also live in gnus-icalendar.el.

Most of the code is still very rough and the implementation is not 
handling all cases correctly. I'm mainly sharing it now to ask you 
whether this is a welcome addition to gnus-icalendar and to ask 
for thoughts on the general implementation, before I spend more 
time to polish the code.

How it works: The code adds functions to create RFC5545 compliant 
VCALENDAR and VEVENT parts from gnus-icalendar-event objects and 
also a function to create a event invitation based on the current 
message buffer.
To create the gnus-icalendar-event the mail addresses in the To 
header are converted to required participants, addresses in Cc are 
interpreted as optional participants and the subject and message 
body are added as summary and description of the event. The date 
range and location have to be entered interactively for now.
Please let me know if you have any other ideas on how users could 
create new events.

Next step will be to polish the code so that the basic 
functionality of creating simple one-shot event invitations works 
reliably.
Long term goals include handling request responses and supporting 
a wider range of the RFC5545 spec.

Thanks!


[-- Attachment #2: gnus-icalendar-request.el --]
[-- Type: application/emacs-lisp, Size: 10080 bytes --]

Re: [RFC] [WIP] Creating icalendar event invitations

[Eric S Fraga]

On Saturday, 13 Jun 2020 at 12:57, Ferdinand Pieper wrote:
> Below is a first rough implementation which I for now kept in a
> separate file from gnus-icalendar.el, but the goal would be for 
> the code to also live in gnus-icalendar.el.

Have just tried this out and it seems to work very well from my limited
testing!  I would love to see this included in gnus. 

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50 & org 9.3.7 on Debian bullseye/sid

Re: [RFC] [WIP] Creating icalendar event invitations

[Gijs Hillenius]

[...]

> handling all cases correctly. I'm mainly sharing it now to ask you 
> whether this is a welcome addition to gnus-icalendar and to ask for
> thoughts on the general implementation, before I spend more time to
> polish the code.

This is totally awesome. I have already used it to set up one
meeting.

Thank you so much for doing this

Re: [RFC] [WIP] Creating icalendar event invitations

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Ferdinand Pieper <fer@pie.tf> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> gnus has good support to accept/decline icalendar invitations with
> gnus-icalendar.el. I'm looking to extend this to also allow the 
> creation of new invitations from within gnus.
> Below is a first rough implementation which I for now kept in a
> separate file from gnus-icalendar.el, but the goal would be for 
> the code to also live in gnus-icalendar.el.
>
> Most of the code is still very rough and the implementation is not
> handling all cases correctly. I'm mainly sharing it now to ask you 
> whether this is a welcome addition to gnus-icalendar and to ask for
> thoughts on the general implementation, before I spend more time to
> polish the code.

I'll echo the others and say this looks great! I assume you've done your
FSF copyright paperwork?

> How it works: The code adds functions to create RFC5545 compliant
> VCALENDAR and VEVENT parts from gnus-icalendar-event objects and 
> also a function to create a event invitation based on the current
> message buffer.
> To create the gnus-icalendar-event the mail addresses in the To header
> are converted to required participants, addresses in Cc are
> interpreted as optional participants and the subject and message 
> body are added as summary and description of the event. The date range
> and location have to be entered interactively for now.
> Please let me know if you have any other ideas on how users could
> create new events.

I think it would be great to be able to create events starting from an
Org heading. Perhaps I've already got an event set up inside Org, and
I'd like to use it to compose an invitation. The various values could be
taken from heading properties, and the timestamp.

> Next step will be to polish the code so that the basic functionality
> of creating simple one-shot event invitations works reliably.
> Long term goals include handling request responses and supporting a
> wider range of the RFC5545 spec.

Looking forward to more!

Re: [RFC] [WIP] Creating icalendar event invitations

[Eric S Fraga]

On Monday, 15 Jun 2020 at 09:18, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
> I think it would be great to be able to create events starting from an
> Org heading. Perhaps I've already got an event set up inside Org, and
> I'd like to use it to compose an invitation. The various values could be
> taken from heading properties, and the timestamp.

And, taking this one step further, being able to create the entry in my
org file from org's agenda view and have it email participants!  :-)

But just being able to send invites from email (gnus) is a major step
forward; everything else is icing on the cake.

-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50 & org 9.3.7 on Debian bullseye/sid