Re: iptel and iCalendar

[John Stracke <francis@xxxxxxxx>]

Patrik Fältström wrote:

> (2) Recurrence rules in IPTEL can be specified in local time without
> a time zone (what is called floating times) and this can lead to
> unexpected behavior

Can someone from IPTEL explain why this was needed? It's not clear to me how it
would be useful for CPL scheduling.  For user events, this is sometimes useful ("I
want to be reminded to take my medicine every day at 7 AM, local time, wherever I
am"); but it's not as if the telephony switch is going to migrate from timezone to
timezone.

> Last point, I have not seen anyone in the CALSH wg commenting on the
> needs for O(1) from the CPL people, like "you can do it this way
> instead" or "we don't think that is important" or even "oooops, we
> made a mistake, we have the same requirement and need to update our
> standard".

Actually, I think it might be useful for calendaring apps, too.  We generally
expand our recurring rules when the event goes into the database, which results in
lots of DB entries.  This means extra disk space--which is fine; disks are
cheap--but it may also mean extra database CPU time spent hunting through those
tables.

In addition, there's the problem of how to build a comprehensible UI that
represents all the capabilities of iCalendar recurrence rules.  My fear is that
people are going to subset the syntax to make the UI workable, and they'll subset
it *differently*.

I was going to write up a Draft with Jonathan Lennox, proposing a uniform subset
that's O(1) and simple to work with; but I got tied up with other work last week,
and now I've missed the new-draft deadline.

--
/=================================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own.   |
|Chief Scientist |================================================|
|eCal Corp.      |"How quietly do you think we can nail these back|
|francis@xxxxxxxx|in?" --Calvin                                   |
\=================================================================/