[Cosmo-dev] Re: [Scooby-dev] Cosmo/Scooby Merge (Please read and comment)

[Jared Rhine]

John Townsend wrote:
> CalDAV support within Cosmo remains unchanged by this merge. We will
> still continue to support CalDAV as a standard and will work to improve
> our CalDAV support over time.

I find this a little bit hard to reconcile.

Let's talk realistically about Beta.

We will have a series of test cases.  These are derived from product features.

If no product of ours exercises the CalDAV features of Cosmo, we will not
have a CalDAV test cases.  Even if you wanted to support CalDAV in Cosmo,
how could you reasonably ask for QA's time to test features that are not in
Beta?

What CalDAV bugs, enhancements, or test cases can rightfully make a
prioritization of bugzilla or bug council over any bug/enhancement in our
own products?

Now, we could resolve this issue by officially saying we support Evolution
over CalDAV or...uh...help me out, another CalDAV client...for the beta.

Then we'd do test cases, catch interoperability bugs, tune the CalDAV paths,
etc.  But I personally would object, given the desired laser-focus on Beta,
to introducing formal support for Evolution.  (Ancillary, incidental
support, great!)  We could not in good faith fully support and advance the
CalDAV features over Chandler/Scooby/Desktop/Hosted Service features.  Any
bug council should deprioritize things than aren't advancing the Beta usage
scenarios.

Despite the vociferous support for CalDAV (which is gratefully acknowledged
and appreciated), if we do not have a supported product of ours using it, it
presents a natural and persistent conflict of prioritization.  Some code
branches are healthy, others are not.  It's not a question of individual
commitment; the dynamics of the system will favor certain things to grow and
other things to wither.

I'm hoping we can keep the CalDAV codebase healthy by having Scooby be a
major consumer.

Is it unrealistic to build Scooby completely on top of CalDAV plus CMP plus
a couple extensions?  We've mostly put aside the argument of performance.
What sort of features in Scooby need direct API access?  (ie, where is
CalDAV plus CMP insufficient?)  Are these features hard to put a network
protocol on top of?

Is the answer primarily one of available people?  I can respect that in the
beta timeframe, but I'd like to go into the next phase knowing what sort of
Cosmo features wouldn't be network available.  And wouldn't it then be
better to remove support for CalDAV entirely during beta to save the most
development effort?  Is CalDAV really so trivial to support that it will
take very little time to keep support even without Scooby (Chandler?) using it?

If every Cosmo API call is committed to have a network-accessible mechanism
on top of what Scooby will use, how much extra time is that?  I can see the
asymmetry between the time needed for Cosmo to provide a feature versus the
time needed for Scooby to use that feature.  Every feature not exposed to
the network is time saved for both Cosmo and Scooby, but again, I'd like to
know as much as possible those feature that would not be network exposed.

Thanks again for considering and responding.

-- Jared