Re: iCal export of repeated tasks

[Adam Spiers <orgmode@adamspiers.org>]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 12:28:48PM +0200, Carsten Dominik wrote:
> On Jun 13, 2008, at 11:24 AM, Adam Spiers wrote:
> >The motivation is that while I very much like org's functionality for
> >automatically updating the timestamp on a repeated task once it has
> >been marked as done, I do not want tasks such as "water plants"
> >cluttering up my calendar forever into the future.  I only care about
> >the next plant watering, not all others thereafter, and with screen
> >real estate always short in supply (especially on mobile devices!),
> >any possible savings are of value.
> 
> I can see that this is useful, but I still insist that Org should  
> export a repeated event as such.

As the *default* behaviour, without another behaviour being very
specifically requested by the user, I entirely agree :-)

> I am adding a hook, `org-before-save-iCalendar-file-hook'.  You can
> add some special cookie in the headline of the entry, and then
> search for this cookie in the exported file and remove the
> repetition rule.  How about that?

Yes thanks; that should do it, and will also possibly enable other use
cases via that hook.

> >Actually, now I think about it more, the above decluttering argument
> >applies equally to the Org agenda itself.  So if it would be a more
> >consistent request from the point of view of maintaining an intuitive
> >UI or from ease of implementation, I would be perfectly happy if the
> >proposed property disabled display of all but the first instance of
> >the repeated task *everywhere*, i.e. not only in iCal exports, but
> >also in agenda displays.
> 
> Org has the variable `org-agenda-repeating-timestamp-show-all' which
> allows to modify this behavior for all repeating time stamps, not
> for individual ones, though.

Well, perhaps you might consider it at some point in the future, or at
least a distinction between repeated events and repeated tasks.
I think we've now spent enough energy on this relatively minor
cosmetic issue though ;-)