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List:       kde-pim
Subject:    Re: [Kde-pim] reminders by email
From:       Reinhold Kainhofer <reinhold () kainhofer ! com>
Date:       2005-01-25 11:49:41
Message-ID: 200501251249.42824.reinhold () kainhofer ! com
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On Monday 24 January 2005 10:24, tomas pospisek wrote:
> 1. stuff is not documented (I've spent nearly 3 hours to find roughly out
>    what is around and what not). Specifically:
>   1.1 why is there kalarm, kalarmd, korgac?
>      conceptually they seem to largely overlap in functionality.

Yes and no. 
As David already wrote, kalarm and kalarmd are the application and the 
reminder daemon for the KAlarm application.

korgac on the other hand is the "KOrganizer alarm client", which is the 
reminder damon of KOrganizer.

So, kalarm and kalarmd belong together, just like korganizer and korgac belong 
together.

>   1.2 one can look at an application's DCOP interface but there's no
>       documentation of those calls.

I don't think korganizer's dcop calls are well documented.

>   1.3 why is korgac called korgac and not korganizerd, since it is a
>       deamon? 

Because long ago it was really a client, and kalarmd (the kded module) was 
used as the daemon to handle all types of alarms. However, this turned out to 
be ways too complex, so Cornelius reimplemented korgac to be a specialized 
reminder daemon for the standard calendar.

> 2. late alarms
>    It _seems_ that korganizer does pick up alarms that have passed unnoted
>    (because the laptop was not running at the time) and _will_ remind the
>    user about them.
>   2.1 It this a _fact_ or just my guess?

Yes, it's a fact. In kde 3.4 it even picks up missed "remind me again later" 
notifications.

> 3. run application on alarm
>    korganizer's interface offers the user to execute an application at
>    reminder time. This does work indeed however absolutely no parameters
>    are given to the application, so the only thing the application (and by
>    consequence the user) knows is that _some_ alarm happend but not why
>    and to what event that relates.
>   3.1 Is there any conceptual problem to just pass the entire event as a
>       parameter in ical format on to the called application? Since many
>       (scripting) languages have libraries for parsing ical formats it
>       shouldn't be a problem for the called application to do something
>       useful with it.

Actually, rfc 2445 specifies that the description property of the VALARM shall 
be passed to the application/script as command-line parameters. I didn't find 
any possibility to send the whole event. The reason is that this is not 
well-defined... What would you pass to the application? 
Only the BEGIN:VEVENT ... END:VEVENT is not sufficient, since the time zone 
data is not in the event itself, but a property of the calendar. And sending 
the whole calendar.... No. 

> 4. What kind of daemon is korgac/kalarmd?
>   4.1 Is it possible to run korgac/kalarmd stand-alone, without KDE, X,
>       Qt, xlib et cetera? Both will be depending on Qt but in theory they
>       could only be depending on the part of Qt that is X independent, and
>       I hear that from some Qt version on Qt will be split into
>       independent parts.

Both need to load an .ics file, so they heavily depend on libkcal, which in 
turn depends on kdelibs, Qt, X etc.
They even depend on a display, since they are the applications that pop up the 
reminder dialogs...
So it's not posible to run them in a console-only terminal.

>       This would make it possible to run korgac/kalarmd centrally on some
>       server and send reminders to people.

Unfortunately that's not possible. What you are looking for is a real 
groupware server that has centralized reminder functionality.


Cheers,
Reinhold

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