[Dev] ICU, datetimes, and recurrence

[Brian Kirsch]

Hi Guys,
I too had a long talk with Nicolas about ICU integration. I am of the 
opinion that we must have a Python
port (wrappers) to the ICU in order to properly support Calendar timing 
and Internationalization. There is
simply nothing else out there that will get the job done as well and 
that is actively maintained.

Nicolas has done quite a bit of work but is still struggling with his 
employer to get the permission to open source his API.

Along those lines Nicolas has agreed to a Q & A session on his ICU work 
during an OSAF IRC office hours. I will coordinate with Pieter on 
scheduling.

There is also a major IBM ICU presence at the 27th ICU and Unicode 
conference I am attending next week.

Realistically, since the wrapping still is a work in progress,  the 
earliest I believe we can get ICU integration in Chandler is late .6 or .7.


Brian Kirsch - Email Framework Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation
543 Howard St. 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 946-3056
http://www.osafoundation.org



Ken Krugler wrote:

> Hi Jeffrey,
>
>> I'd like to get recurrence working in Chandler in the early 0.6
>> timeframe.  At the moment, Chandler does't store repeating events in the
>> repository as anything but a finite number of disconnected events.
>> There are various problems with this:
>
>
> [snip]
>
>> It's not particularly hard to convert one datetime class instance to
>> another, but it would be great to only have one datetime class in use
>> throughout Chandler.
>>
>> There will be a lot of code in Chandler that displays datetimes, these
>> datetimes will need to be localized.  Overall, it might make our lives
>> easiest to settle on ICU datetimes throughout our content model.
>
>
> I think this would be a really good idea, especially since (a) there 
> are other parts of ICU that would be important for Chandler I18N (such 
> as message formatting), and (b) using ICU would guarantee consistent 
> behavior across platforms (and OS versions), which has been a common 
> problem with other date/time support packages, especially the standard 
> C library.
>
>> If we
>> follow this path, to get recurrence working we'll need to:
>>
>> A) Pry some working bindings out of Nick's tender clutches :).  Nick
>> says he's got a fair fraction of ICU datetimes working, but the bindings
>> as a whole aren't done.  My (perhaps naive) hope is to do the work to
>> get recurrence working using one date time class.
>>
>> So if we decide to use ICU datetimes through Chandler, it would be great
>> to start integrating ICU ASAP.  We probably won't be able to switch
>> everything over yet, since the bindings aren't done, but we could at
>> least get started switching over datetimes.
>
>
> Adding ICU as a library that's available for Mac/Windows/Linux should 
> be pretty straightforward, as it's regularly built for a wide variety 
> of platforms, and there's very good on-line support (mostly from 
> George Rhoten, an IBM employee).
>
> It would be interesting to find out what version of ICU Nick has been 
> wrapping. The current latest release is 3.2, with 3.4 due out late 
> this spring.
>
> -- Ken