Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
From what you say, it sounds like the phones don't actually run caldav clients, they instead just run an http/html client that speaks to some web app at google.com/apple.com, and the web app once used caldav internally?
Sadly, I'm no expert at this. (I don't even so far use smartphones.) I suspect that it all depends on what sort of client service on the phone you're talking about, i.e., is it one of the ones designed to work with real iCalendar scheduling servers (w/access protocols), or is it just a Web wrapper devoted entirely to a Web site fronting scheduling data.
[...] To know more, I'd have to do the same from-near-zero research you would, and you have the advantage of a test platform. ;->
No worries. I was hoping to just boost your findings so I wouldn't have to do any investigation myself :-)
Hrm, that might explain why every time I look at "add calendars" to my existing postfix+dovecot stack, there seems to be some missing magic in between "caldav server is installed" and "people with phones can do useful things with it".
I do know that, if you engage with the communities using software like Radicale as server-side solutions, they can tell you a lot about what works client-side and anything required to mesh the two -- perhaps the missing glue in your (one hopes, roughtly corresponding) server stack that's purported to make people with phones do useful things to your server if you do the 'add calendars' step.
Taking a quick gander at Radicale (assuming it's feature-comparable): Front page encouragingly says 'Works with many CalDAV and CardDAV clients.' Well, peachy. https://radicale.org/clients/ elaborates:
Radicale has been tested with:
Android with DAVdroid GNOME Calendar, Contacts and Evolution Mozilla Thunderbird with CardBook and Lightning InfCloud, CalDavZAP and CardDavMATE
Goes on to give specific tips. Of course, this information would be useful to _you_ only to the extent that your server stack truly has the identical capabilities, and I haven't a clue what a postfix+dovecot stack with 'calendars' would comprise/do, really.
I did get radicale installed and running (IIRC just "apt install radicale"), and could browse to it, and then IIRC I got stuck because I couldn't see how to do anything very useful with it (e.g. when your mailer sees an ical/vcal attachment, somehow tell radicale about it). I would've tried curl and MAYBE thunderbird, and told someone with a smartphone "it's at https://xxx, try it", then given up, I guess. I have no idea what android client(s) they tried. I think around that time I also noticed that literally no-one uses WebDAV because it's awful. The only things that use it are apache httpd and apache svn. Like, I couldn't even find the equivalent of "busybox ftpget" for it. And the CardDAV / CalDAV docs just go "hey it's just ics/vcs files on DAV, and everyone knows how to DAV, because DAV was a *huge* success and replaced FTP as the standard B2B interchange protocol... right?" Er... \end{rant}
[...] there wasn't agreement about what client-side needed to do, hence no agreement on linking protocols.
Yeah, I'm not clear on that either :-) PS: I also tried Apple Calendarserver back before radicale was "A Thing", but got even less far due to (deliberate?) lack of documentation no Apple's part.