Re: Org-mode is not able to manage complex calendar events

[Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at>]

* Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:
>
>> IMHO: Org-mode does *not* seem to be made for managing calendar
>> events that go beyond simple one-time-occurrence events. 
>
> I would argue that this is not at all the case, especially if you
> consider that org uses a tree hierarchy and tags so that one can group
> separate entries in a variety of ways, 

This is fore sure a big advantage of Org-mode!

> you can clone with time shift whole trees, etc.  

Oh, I have to look up that clone thing. This is new to me. Do you
happen to have an URL for this feature by instance?

> Most calendar tools require you to specify all the
> conditions for a particular "event" in one go whereas with org you can
> have a number of different entries for the same "event"... etc.

Full ack.

> Also, with sexp, you can manage practically anything you might like
> although, of course, it does require learning a certain amount of
> elisp.  Recurring events with exceptions are not a problem, for
> instance.

I'd consider myself tech-savvy. But without having learned (E)LISP
(yet), I can not use sexp-entries without reading a manual each time
I want to use it. This is nothing I'd consider for normal users or
daily use. It's not that end-user friendly (when you consider
end-users as users without ELISP knowledge).

For ELISP hackers this might work! But I am not sure how much
percentage of Emacs/Org-mode users actually learned ELISP.

And learning ELISP just to be able to write down a recurring event
seems «strange» to me.

> In any case, as always with computer tools, what works for you is what
> matters!  

Full Ack.

> For me, org is just plainly much more suitable for my mode of
> working; every other calendar system I have tried has constrained me
> much more.  But that's *me*.

This holds for most of the calendar systems out there, I totally
agree.

(This is why I still carry around my old PalmOS-PDA together with my
highly sophisticated Android smartphone...)

>> but you *have* to support at least the same featureset of Outlook
>> Calendar in order to think of a (two-way-) sync mechanism to
>> Org-mode.
>
> I guess this depends on what types of events you are likely to
> have in the outlook calendar.  In my case, only a small feature
> set is likely necessary (mostly repeating lectures and one off
> meetings) so a sync should be possible.  I don't think anybody is
> proposing a full-blown totally automatic sync mechanism between
> org and Outlook (or whatever) that covers the union of the two
> products' feature sets...  insanity lies in that direction ;-)

Sorry, I might have exaggerated a bit.

But since I was implementing a one-way-sync mechanism between two
different calendar systems I got a pretty good feeling of how
different you can define the very same thing. Recurring events with
exceptions is quite common but very hard to sync between different
systems! And I am sure that this is not the only example of «being
common and hard to do».

> But I'll worry about this later this year when forced to use MS...

Oh, sorry to hear about that :-(



For ELISP-hackers out there: is this hard to do? A method which
can be called «generate a series of Org-mode time stamps starting
with $THIS_TIMESTAMP_CONTAINING_REPEATS up to $THIS date». 

I could think of generating such a series of <2011-06-22 Wed>
<2011-06-29 Wed> ... just to be able to see all occurrences of an
event and delete one specific event in between if necessary. This
would ease exceptions for «ordinary» users like me.

-- 
Karl Voit