LWN article on Limux / WiMue and PMPC

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

Reading the comments that replied to your message there make me feel
like a blind person in a shootout...

Anyways, back on the topic.

I think one way out of this would be making free/libre software that
follows entirely public and well document "open" standards (as some
people call it, although I don't like the "open" word), and I mean to
follow it extrictly, that is: if there is something missing in the
standard, make a change in the standard, not a custom part in the data
file. For a criticism on "customizing the data file" see [1], and
also note that as far as I know, GNOME Evolution, Kontact and KMail tend
to do this customization.

For contact management, use vCard standard; for calendar and event/task
organzing, use iCalendar standard.

One other way would be to follow a known file format used mainly by a
free/libre software for these two matters mentioned in the paragraph
above. For example, Emacs BBDB 3 for contact management; and Emacs Org
mode, or Emacs Diary mode (this one is limited to current day) both of
which can be used for organizing events/tasks. Currently I don't know if
these have synchronization support but in case of Org mode I know one
can always do some GNU Sed or Emacs Lisp trick to only extract parts of
the agenda file that someone else uses).

Still on the subject of how to synchronize public Emacs Org mode
agendas, there is currently an interesting discussion in [2].

The idea is to have various softwares that works with a given file
format or standard, and in  such way that it doesn't make the end-user
tied to a particular software or particular graphic environment.

This multi-software setup we have so far can be seen in the case of
Emacs Org mode documents (Emacs and Pandoc support converting from it to
other formats, and any plain text editor can change the file), LaTeX
(LaTeX/PDFLaTeX, LuaTeX, XeTeX, ConTeXt, TeX4Ht, HTLaTeX, and many
other *compilers* support it, also any plain text editor can change the
file), Ledger accounting files (many Ledger-likes support reading from
it, and any plain text editor can edit the files).

In the case of LaTeX, I was made aware that some compilers *other than*
LaTeX/PDFLaTeX, TeX4Ht and HTLaTeX seem to implement custom commands not
supported by these just mentioned.

[1] <https://alessandrorossini.org/the-sad-story-of-the-vcard-format-and-its-lack-of-interoperability/>.

[2] <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2017-11/msg00213.html>.

2017-11-16T18:36:30+0100 Paul Boddie wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> I left a comment as well:
>
> https://lwn.net/Articles/739339/
>
> Rather than focus on this particular situation in Munich, it discusses how the 
> body of available Free Software work (focusing here on calendaring and 
> groupware) may not convincingly offer obvious solutions to organisations, and 
> it suggests why this might be happening and what might be done to rectify such 
> problems.
>
> Paul
>
> P.S. The article is now freely viewable. I have previously seen people post 
> subscriber links to mailing lists, usually with the explicit permission of the 
> authors and editors. Indeed, I've seen the LWN staff post subscriber links to 
> mailing lists themselves.
> _______________________________________________
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion at lists.fsfe.org
> https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
>

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