Journal Haeleth's Journal: The sorry state of calendar sync on Linux
All I want to do is synchronise my Google calendar with my computer, so I can read and add entries even when I don't have an internet connection. That shouldn't be so hard, should it?
Apparently it is.
Google's own Google Gears is read-only. Useless.
The only Linux calendar client that Google supports is Mozilla Sunbird. Yeah, the discontinued one. It does do CalDAV, but it's online-only; if I'm offline, the only way to get my calendar is to use the scary "EXPERIMENTAL!!!111" cache option, and that's read-only and buggy to boot. Useless.
Evolution supports CalDAV. Unfortunately, Evolution wants to take over my entire computer. I had to put in a fake email account before it would even let me look at the calendar options. The UI is frankly horrible. There is apparently no way to get rid of the irrelevant "task" pane; I can shrink it to take up no space, but then when I resize the window, all the extra space is given back to the task pane instead of to the calendar itself. It also insists on trying to add all new entries to the non-deletable "Personal" calendar, even though I have hidden this and set my Google calendar to be the default calendar. I'm not surprised it's useless, of course; all the development effort will be going into supporting Microsoft Exchange, in line with Novell's usual policy of preferring Microsoft lock-in over open standards.
KDE's calendar program looks quite nice. It supports all kinds of synchronisation options. Er... that is, apart from the single useful standard, CalDAV. The absence of which, people have been complaining about literally for years. Apparently they're waiting for opensync (aka Godot; see below). Or possibly something called Akonadi (Godot's little brother). It looks like someone else has recently got sick of waiting and started actually writing some code to fix this gaping hole, which is a pleasant surprise, but their project doesn't actually work yet. Good luck to them anyway.
So, what's left? There's a promising project called opensync that claims to be able to synchronise any sort of calendar I like. This sounds like exactly what I'm looking for! Oh, wait: the last stable release is ancient; the last couple of years have been spent completely breaking the whole API; the Google Calendar plugin is unmaintained and is broken even in the stable version; there is no CalDAV support at all. The current status report labels everything as either alpha-quality or totally broken. Good stuff. Enjoy gazing at your navels, opensync developers! I'm so glad you decided to rearchitect your project instead of making it useful.
Which leaves only one option: GCalDaemon. I refuse to touch this with a bargepole. Not because it's unmaintained, not even because it's written in Java, but because its developers seem to have been totally clueless, and I will not trust their code on my computer. They expect me to put user-specific configuration files under
Never mind, I'll write my own. Sigh.
