[Dev] The Chandler/Cosmo sharing format

[Morgen Sagen]

On Mar 13, 2006, at 5:31 PM, Lisa Dusseault wrote:

> Sorry to be confusing, I'll try to ask clearer questions and expose  
> my assumptions first.  Part of what I'm assuming is that not every  
> organization will find Cosmo to be the final answer.  I'll use  
> universities as an example, since that's where we've got a lot of  
> awareness of the requirements.  Some universities will want to use  
> Chandler and will want Chandler sharing to work, yet they'll look  
> for a commercial solution, or want use something with edu-specific  
> features. Will they be able to?
>
> The answer to that today is "no", but it's not hard to get to "yes."
>  - To be able to use RPI's CalDAV server, it would have to support  
> tickets and the ability to share other kinds of collections besides  
> calendars
>  - To be able to use Xythos WFS, the universities would only have  
> to convince Xythos to add CalDAV support.
>  - To be able to use Slide, somebody would need to add CalDAV  
> support and tickets.
>
> What I meant by "stick with a list of published or publishable  
> items" is that ideally we could tell the potential organizational  
> users of Chandler a short list of free and public specifications  
> that a fully-functional Chandler sharing server would have to support.
>
> How far short of this ideal do we actually fall or plan to fall?   
> Well...
>  - CalDAV isn't a standard yet.  We keep pushing it though and it  
> will get there.
>  - Tickets isn't a standard, though at least it's published, and we  
> could reasonably propose standardizing it -- it could become an  
> Experimental RFC pretty easily if somebody (who, me?) made that  
> final push.
>  - A custom Chandler format?  While that's a publishable spec, and  
> it's conceivable that other servers could support a custom Chandler  
> format, is it reasonable?  Will we actually do the work and publish  
> the spec?  Will we stick to it and support that custom format for  
> release after release in order to be backwards compatible with  
> older versions of Cosmo and any other server?
>
> I guess part of what I'm asking is "what don't I know" about  
> interoperability with this proposal and part of it is "what are we  
> willing to commit to".
>  - Besides the proposed custom format, are there any other non- 
> standard pieces that haven't already made it onto our server  
> requirements list?
>  - Would it be reasonable for us to publish a custom format  
> specification?  By when?
>  - Would it be reasonable for us to keep backwards-compatibility  
> with that custom format specification?
>  - Is it likely that any other software would want to use this,  
> besides servers who need specifically to interoperate with  
> Chandler?  (If we did something like xCalendar, the answer to this  
> might be a nuanced "yes")
>
> Lisa
>

Will we share anything besides calendar events?  If that answer is  
yes, then we need to define a format to share items in.  By using off- 
the-shelf vocabularies, I think that it is reasonable to believe that  
other clients and servers could support the format.  I understand  
that it will take work to strive for backward-compatibility, etc.