org-agenda-evolution link

Import Evolution calendars into org-mode, via one-way synchronisation (i.e., it tries to merge your org event edits with event updates in the calendars, but doesn’t push them to those calendars, at least not yet.)

Status

I use it for myself fairly continuously, but for general use it lacks:

• an installation mechanism
• configuration management

Alternatives

• Exchange: org-excorporate (I couldn’t get it to work on the setup I was using, which is how this project came about)
• GCal: Various options listed by the org-mode team (I haven’t tried them)

Usage

• Set up Evolution to sync with any Exchange, GCal, … servers you want to work with.
• Pick a name for an org file that you will be using exclusively for calendars and events from Evolution.
• Tweak the source code for your custom org-mode configuration (e.g., if your time zone is not UTC). (There is no configuration system right now, though many bits of interest are top-level definitions in some of the source files.)
• Manually check that it works (cf. “Running”, below)
• Set up cron to run main.py regularly, as outlined below.

Missing features

• Configuration file
• Installation / packaging (suggestions welcome!)
• Merging calendar changes back to Evolution
• Multi-day events: must be broken up into individual days for proper org-mode handling (I think?)
• Integration with org-agenda recurrence. Emitting these is implemented but currently disabled, since it doesn’t integrate with merging.
• More detailed tracking (e.g., per-field hashes) to better support fine-grained event merging

Known bugs

• Changing an event end date in the org file is ignored when merging the event with the Evolution calendar (at least for recurring events).
• Custom time zones are detected but don’t work properly
• Not all ICal recurrence features are suported (only the ones I’ve been able to set up myself for testing)
• Changes to events in a series don’t seem to show up reliably (e.g., individual events cancelled by Apple’s calendaring software are still marked TODO; suggestions welcome)

Dependencies

• python-3.9
• gir1.2-ecalendar-1.2
• gir1.2-ecal-2.0
• orgparse
• python3-tzinfo

Running

Initial fetch:

python3 main.py -F ${HOME}/my/org/files/evolution-calendars.org

Update and merge (new):

python3 main.py -U ${HOME}/my/org/files/evolution-calendars.org

(Tries to merge changes in the org file with changes in the calendar)

Testing

./test.sh