Calypso CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV for Android and Evolution
Ever since I bought my first Palm Pilot in 1997, I ve relied upon a
pocket-able device to carry a copy of my calendar and contacts, and for
that same database to be present on my laptop. I went through a long
list of Palm-compatible devices, including both the Palm Treo and Palm
Centro telephones. I even wrote a number of my own
Palm
applications. Years ago, it was pretty obvious that I d have
to find a new phone, but I was stuck looking for something that could
provide the same hot-sync functionality.
SyncML on the Series 40
I bought a Series 40 Nokia phone in Shanghai that promised SyncML
support. Given that I had seen numerous SyncML implementations for
Linux, it seemed like I should be able to get something to work.
SyncML on the Series 40 is a disaster the phone couldn t actually
store all of my contacts, and it couldn t hold half of the data
fields I used. So, that phone landed in the box and back to the Centro
I went.
SyncML on the N900
Nokia kindly sent me an N900 at some point, so I gave SyncML another
try. Given that the N900 runs evolution-data-server, and that I ve had
evolution-data-server running on my laptop, it seemed like I should be
in business. Well, almost. It took several days of hacking to fix bugs
in the evolution SyncML back end, then another several days fussing
with opensync.
I ended up abandoning direct synchronization as unworkable opensync
would sit in an infinite loop, or worse, trash my database
completely. I finally found syncml-ds-tool , which is a debugging
tool that comes with opensync. This tool simply synchronizes a set of
disk files, one per contact or calendar entry, with the phone. That
worked for well over a year. And then, a few months ago, Bluetooth on
the laptop stopped connecting with the phone s SyncML server. I d get
ECONNREFUSED every time I tried to use it. So much for the N900. DUN
still worked, mostly, although it too would get ECONNREFUSED at times,
but retrying seemed to make it work.
However, While the N900 SyncML solution worked, I discovered another
thing I wanted contacts and calendar entries stored in individual
files and revision controlled with git. This makes it reasonable to
delete stale calendar entries and know that they re never really gone,
just left behind in an older version of the calendar. And, if you mess
up, you can recover by poking at the database with git directly.
I switched back to the venerable Palm Centro; it turns out that
calendar and contacts are more important to me than being able to surf
the web on my phone. Alas, my Centro went swimming in August and has
passed on to the great electronics recycling house in the sky. I pulled
the SIM out and switched back to the N900.
I got my contacts imported on the N900 by copying files over the net
work; not a long-term strategy, but at least I had phone numbers
again. There was no hope for my calendar. I started looking for a
solution in earnest.
How about Android?
At this point in my story, I m sure you re asking why I didn t just
use one of the numerous Android phones that came through my hands. The
answer is simple my calendar and contacts are probably some of my
most personal data, and I m not willing to store them outside of my
direct control, for reasons similar to those which are driving the
development of the
FreedomBox.
When Android first came out, it could only talk to Google
services, which didn t meet my hard requirement for personal data
storage.
One of my co-workers had his Google account suspended for violating
the terms-of-service; he asked what he had done, but they wouldn t
say. He asked if he could get his data back, and they said no . They
invited him to create a new account, but it would not ever get any of
the old data. A few days later, he got a nice apologetic email letting
him know that they d made a mistake and that he hadn t, in fact,
violated any of the terms-of-service, and that his old account was
restored with all of his data intact. Wasn t that nice of Google?
WebOS?
I got a WebOS phone over the summer and discovered that while it had
multiple contact/calendar back ends, none of them used standard
protocols and so you only had the choice between multiple corporate
data centers, which isn t actually a choice at all.
Furthermore, the WebOS phone refused route PAN packets over the phone
network, even though I have a data plan which allows this. It s not
that it couldn t support it, it s that it refused.
A couple of weeks after the WebOS phone arrived, HP canceled all of
their WebOS hardware products, which made me less interested in trying
to solve this problem.
Android recovers
About the same time the WebOS phone arrived, I discovered that Google
had published enough information about the calendar/contacts internals
for Marten Gajda to write
CalDAV-Sync and
CardDAV-Sync. And then, Andrew McMillan
wrote
aCal, which is a
complete replacement for the built-in calendar and contacts
applications and supports CalDAV and CardDAV.
With two different standards-compliant solutions available, it seemed
like it might be time to try Android again.
I d love for CardDAV-Sync and CalDAV-Sync to become free software like
aCal is. Andrew makes money from aCal by offering it for sale via the
Android Market, while still publishing the sources for those who want
to build their own copy.
CalDAV/CardDAV on Linux
I think the most widely known CalDAV server for Linux is probably
DAViCal, a huge pile of PHP and SQL sitting
on top of Apache. I m sure it s suitable for running on a server
and being accessed over the internet, but I m not interested in that,
nor am I interested in having my laptop run Apache and PostgreSQL.
I found a tiny little CalDAV server,
Radicale,
which seemed like a lot better fit. It s written in Python and uses
the usual Python HTTP server infrastructure, which provides SSL and
authentication support along with some fairly convenient APIs for
parsing and generating HTML.
Before long, I discovered that Radicale was actually
too simple for
my needs. It stores the whole calendar in a single file, re-parsing it
whenever a request is made, so a calendar with just hundreds of
entries caused the server to slow down enough that evolution would
time-out when talking to it.
Also, Radicale doesn t actually parse the calendar entries completely,
it has some ad-hoc code that finds various pieces of data, but without
dealing with the whole syntax.
I started hacking at Radicale to see how far I could get. I changed
the storage code to store one event per file, then added hooks to use
git for change management. Then, I found a full vcalendar/vcard
parsing library in python,
vobject, which I used to
replace the ad-hoc parsing code. Finally, I added support for VCARD
entries as well, allowing the system to store both calendar and
contact information.
Introducing Calypso, a CardDAV/CalDAV server
With this much divergence from the original project, I ve figured I d
best rename things to avoid confusion, so I decided to call it
calypso , after a brief trip through the dictionary looking for names
starting with ca .
Calypso works with evolution, iceowl and the Android CalDAV/CardDAV
plugins. It does not yet work with aCal; for some reason aCal cannot
find any calendars on the server.
Calypso also supports importing calendar changes from the command
line, allowing you to integrate support into a text-based email
application like
notmuch or
mutt.
Calypso is available via git from git://keithp.com/git/calypso and is
distributed under the GPL (v3 or later). I still consider it a work
derived from Radicale, and so the code retains all of the Radicale
copyrights along with my own.
Using Calypso
Initial setup
Calypso runs as a regular user, all data are stored in
~/.config/calypso. To initialize calypso:
$ mkdir ~/.config/calypso ~/.config/calypso/calendars
$ cat > ~/.config/calypso/config << EOF
[server]
ssl=true
certificate=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/ssl/server.crt
key=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/ssl/server.key
[acl]
;type=htpasswd
type=fake
filename=/home/keithp/.config/calypso/passwd
Running calypso
Then run calypso:
$ python ./calypso.py
No, I haven t figured out how to install it
Creating new calendars
To add a new database:
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/calypso/calendars/private/my_calendar
$ cd ~/.config/calypso/calendars/private/my_calendar
$ git init
$ git commit --allow-empty -m'initialize new calendar'
The new calendar should now be visible as
https://localhost:5233/private/my_calendar
You can add files to the directory at any time; calypso will check the
directory mtime at each operation and update its internal state from
that on disk automatically when the directory changes.
Importing files
Given a set of files with VCALENDAR or VCARD entries, you can import
them with:
$ calypso --import private/my_calendar <filenames...>
This will update any changed entries and add any new ones.
ToDo list for calypso
- Document the config file contents.
- Make it installable
- Figure out what aCal wants
- Support calendar creation
More Android info
- Synker.
This provides a desktop widget which starts the sync process
running on a list of accounts. This makes it easy to manually
synchronize with the laptop when you are connected
- Contact Editor.
This lets you fully edit contacts synchronized over CardDAV. The
built-in contact editor doesn t let you change anything other than
the name for some reason.
I m running
cyanogenmod on my Nexus S
as that provides PAN support. With PAN, I can create a network link
between laptop and phone which doesn t depend on any local WiFi
infrastructure and which gives both phone and laptop static IP
addresses, allowing me to configure the sync URLs statically on the
phone. I d use mDNS, but Android doesn t bother to support that.
In KDE e.V. (which is to KDE</kde> what SPI is to Debian, Jenkins and others) there is some times a need to vote. For example about accepting new members. Mostly about accepting new members. With the new vote system (ballot.kde.org), voters need to do a bit more to check their votes afterwards. basically
There it is. Nice. Simple. Effective.
Sources available. http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fsune%2Fkrapyl.git&a=summary have fun, and remember to verify your votes.
This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who 
Dpkg and Multiarch
I had some hope to have a multiarch-enabled dpkg in sid for Christmas as Guillem told me that it was realistic. Alas Guillem got sick. We re in January and we re still not there.
While some of Guillem s commits in December were related to multi-arch, the size of his 
Misc dpkg work
I reviewed (and later merged) a patch of Kees Cook to enhance dpkg-buildflags so that it can report which hardening features are enabled. This feature might then be used by tools like lintian to detect missing hardening features.
I 
Somebody probably already recommended you to switch to Git, because 
(
A recent trip to Switzerland made me dig out my prepaid card for UMTS usage
again. This resulted in some minor enhancements for Prepaid Manager. The 
This blog is 
A new release 0.9.8 of 
I must confess, I thought only DD s can be on the Debian Planet and a few days ago I read someone telling me that I must add my blog to the planet, so I went to the 
I left you 2.5 months ago with the last question asked by my
applicaiton manager, Martin Michlmayr : "Please tell me about about yourself and what
you intend to do for Debian".
Interesting question to revisit now, indeed. Here is what I answered:
About myself first.
I'm a 40 year old project manager and system administrator working in French
National Aerospace Research Center. My best definition of my skills in
computing is "Know more or less about a Lot of Things and be a Specialist of
Nothing"...:-). I'm definitely not a programmer, nor a real system
administrator, nor a RDBMS administrator, nor a personal workstation
designer, though I do all of these daily. I think I'm perfect for finding
the good person for having a defined job done.
Besides this, I'm a genealogist for several years now. This is what finally
decided me to apply for becoming a package maintainer : there are some quite
good free genealogy software for Unix, though for various reasons they are
not used very widely, even Unix geeks (my main software for genealogy still
runs on Another Operatin System and is evertythig but free).I think that I
can bring something here to the Free Software World, by helping some of
these good programs in getting into the best Linux distribution I know....
For me, this is a mean for giving back to the free software movement what I
gives to me since I discovered Linux 6-7 years ago.
My very first intention as soon as I get my way into the Debian Developers
Heaven is adopting the Geneweb package currently maintained by Brent
Flugham. I'm in close contact with the author (who happens to be french,
which helps) as well as a daily user of it. The current package which is in
the distribution is already my work for a great part. I gave it to Brent,
the current maintainer and we both agreed that it would be better for me to
apply to becoming anofficial maintainer.
I also contributed to the package for lifelines, another genealogy software.
The last version of the package is also 80% my work, acknowledged by Javier,
the official maintainer. Concerning that package, I do not have "plans" for
adopting it (we didn't discussed of this with Javier, and I'm not sure I
could bring him that much things).
I came to Linux thanks to a great friend of mine, Ren Cougnenc. Ren opened
my eyes to the free software world when I still thought that it was only a
variant of free beers.
I got really involved into Linux when I forced me to remove any other
Operating System from my computer at work and tried to do my daily job with
Linux.
I have now succeeded at ONERA in getting free software to be accepted as a
credible alternative for important projects. At this time, especially for
server and network-related projects.
I absolutely cannot tell why and how I came to be a Debian user. I simply
don't remember. But I know why I am still a Debian user : this is a
distribution which is controlled by only one organisation--->its users. And
I want to be part of it.
Finally, I did not mention above the somewhat "political" nature of my
personal involvment into free software. Except for the physical appearence,
I think I mimic RMS on several points (though he probably speaks better
french than I try to speak english....which does not help for expressing
complex ideas like the ones above!).
As anyone can see, I was already very verbose when writing, sorry for
this. Funnily Martin summed this up in one paragraph when he posted
his AM report about my application. From what I see, also, my English
didn't improve that much since then. It seems this is a
desperatecause, I'm afraid.
Anyway, all this was apparently OK for Martin and, on July 21st 2001,
he wrote and posted his AM report and, on July 30th 2001, I got a mail
by James Troup:
An account has been created for you on developer-accessible machines
with username 'bubulle'.
bubulle@debian.org was born. Now I can more easily destro^W contribute
to my favourite Linux distro.
Indeed, I don't remember that much about the 2001-2003 years. I was
probably not that active in Debian. Mostly, I was maintaining geneweb,
for which I polished the package to have it reach a quite decent
state, with elaborated debconf configuration. Indeed, at that time, I
was still also deeply involved in genealogy research and still
contributing to several mutual help groups for this. This is about the
time where I did setup 
According to Eric S. Raymond, one rule for Unix programming is the Rule of
Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
Since return codes are a form of information, I would like to add: when a
program has carried out its task with no surprise, it should exit(0).Take