Upcoming.org and Sunbird

I’ve been using Sunbird for a long time. I like it. It’s nice. It’s got bugs, but that’s ok, they get fixed, it works good enough, and it’s open-source.

I’ve been a fan of Upcoming.org for a while now. they got bought by Yahoo! and I hoped it would go well. I still hope it will go well. Still, I’ll spill what the last week has brought.

I installed Sunbird 0.3 alpha1 last week. Unfortunately, all my Upcoming.org calendars broke. Ugh… I dig around, check release notes, try a few things, and… nothing. Am I the only one who uses Upcoming.org and Sunbird together?

Anyway, I don’t give up. I start hacking away at the calendars that are output from Upcoming.org, and I have a few ideas on what is going wrong. I first think it’s a Sunbird thing, since everything worked fine until I upgraded to the latest version. I figure I’ll submit a bug, I mean edit the Bug_Reports wiki page at Upcoming.org (Note: A wiki might not be the best thing for tracking bugs) but get no response. I end up adding to the wiki everytime I learn something. Oh, and it’s a good thing the Sunbird folks do use a real bugtracker, as the bug I submitted to Bugzilla clued me in on the problem.

Of course I figured out a workaround. I mean, I didn’t want to wait for a new release of Sunbird, or wait for the Upcoming.org folks to fix things on their end, so I wrote a cgi on my own server that fetches the Upcoming.org calendar, and re-writes it so it works in Sunbird. Problem (somewhat/temporarily) solved.

I just sent a feedback email to Upcoming.org today. Let’s see what happens next. (I’m also wondering if this blog post will have any effect.)