[Design] The user, the Chandler and the ICalendar VTODO

[Grant Baillie]

So, this is a heads up that last Friday I checked in a fix for  
reading and writing VTODOs (a.k.a. Tasks) in ICalendar, c.f.

Bug 6848: Chandler should be able to read/write ICalendar VTODOs

A couple of notes for those of you following along at home:

- VTODO has a DUE property, which (shockingly) is the date/time the  
task is due. As discussed on the design list a while back, I went  
ahead and had the importer create an Event+Task item if there’s a  
DUE, with the Event's start time set to the DUE value. If there’s no  
DUE, we just go ahead and create an ordinary old Task.

- In the case of VTODO, we are able to use the STATUS field (which is  
allowed different values compared to VEVENT) to preserve Triage  
Status. In the end, I thought I found a vaguely reasonable  
interpretation of the ICalendar values:

    needs-action   <==> NOW, with needsReply==True
    in-process      <==> NOW, with needsReply==False
    cancelled       <==> LATER
    completed      <==> DONE

- There are some known bugs where Chandler won’t subscribe to .ics  
URLs that contain only VTODOs (e.g. bugzilla). These currently don’t  
work due to some HTTP problems (i.e. in zanshin), but I did double- 
check that the new code could successfully import the contents of  
those URLs.

- Chandler doesn't round-trip VTODO properly: If we read a VTODO with  
a DUE, we write out a VEVENT (i.e. the Event-ness of the Event+Task  
in Chandler takes precedence when we choose what ICalendar to write).  
This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but doing so right away would  
break some existing Cosmo shares. I’ll probably wait till the current  
“dual share” scheme in Chandler is gone till I fix it ... see Bug  
8321 for details.

Let me know if you have comments, questions etc etc,
--Grant
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