Re: Improving Emacs' iCalendar support

[Visuwesh]

[புதன் அக்டோபர் 23, 2024] Richard Lawrence wrote:

> Hi Visuwesh,
>
> Visuwesh <visuweshm@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> It has been at least a couple years since I wrote this function so I
>> don't remember the hurdles I faced when I wrote it very well but it
>> perplexed me that there were no "public" functions that were geared
>> towards parsing an ical file.  In retrospect, it would have been less
>> confusing if these functions were "public" functions.  AFAIR, and this
>> very well might not be true, the structure returned
>> icalendar--read-element is not really documented anywhere which further
>> added to the confusion.
>
> Yes, I had the same feeling. I spent a while looking through
> icalendar.el about six months ago, hoping I could find an appropriate
> point to hook into it/extend it. But the private function names and lack
> of documentation of the data structures eventually caused me to give up.
> I couldn't figure out a good way to use it or patch it to do what I
> wanted, and it seemed like there were a lot of things it didn't
> implement anyway...thus this current project ;)

Understood.  pp is the reason why that function exists.  It look a bit
of trial and error to write it.

>> That said, this function has been rock solid ever since I wrote it.
>> Going by the ical files I have, it is working just fine since 2021.
>
> Are you saying it would be important to you to preserve the "private"
> API of icalendar.el? or just that you're glad this API is still working? 

The latter.  It would be nice if the former could be achieved too but
that is not a hard requirement.  It wouldn't be too much of a hurdle if
the new library is well documented.