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

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

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!