As a follow up to calendar synchronisation with calypso, syncevolution and the N900 running maemo I finally added contacts to the mix:

on the phone

When you have the calendar sync already running it's as simple as:

First start ssh on the n900 to ease typing:

apt-get install dropbear
echo /bin/sh >> /etc/shells
cd /etc/dropbear && ./run

SSH into the phone and configure contacts synchronization:

cat <<EOF > ~/.config/syncevolution/webdav/sources/addressbook/config.ini
backend = CardDAV
database = https://carddav.example.com/contacts/username
EOF

And perform the initial sync:

syncevolution --sync slow webdav addressbook

From there on you can sync contacts and calendars in one go with:

syncevoluton webdav

Looking at the calypso logs on the server it seems that syncevoluton does not always generate an FN entry and so the card gets skipped. This doesn't harm the overall sync, but I need to have a look how to fix this.

on the laptop

In order to use the contacts im mutt there's pycarddav packaged in Debian. This is basically following upstreams documentation.

sudo apt-get install pycarddav
mkdir -p ~/.config/pycard
cp /usr/share/doc/pycarddav/examples/pycard.conf.sample ~/.config/pycard/pycard.conf
# Edit file as needed

cat ~/.config/pycard/pycard.conf
[Account username]
user: username
resource: https://carddav.example.com/
write_support = YesPleaseIDoHaveABackupOfMyData

[query]
where: vcard

[sqlite]

[default]
debug: False

To use the entries in mutt add the just extend your .muttrc:

cat <<EOF >>~/.muttrc
set query_command="pc_query -m %s"
macro index,pager B "<pipe-message>pycard-import<enter>" "add sender address to pycardsyncer"
EOF

This allows you to query contacts using Q and add new conatcs with CTRL-B in mutt's index and pager.

Calypso Changes

We recently moved calypso's git repository to alioth and started to merge several out of tree patches. More will happen during this years Debian Groupware Meeting including a new upload to Debian.

One of the replies to the post about Debian's last groupware meeting was from Patrick Ohly of syncevolution fame pointing out that syncevolution already implements calendar autodetection for CalDAV calendars as described in draft-daboo-srv-caldav-10.

While looking at the code I noticed that there's a backend for the N900s calendar by Ove Kåven as well.

When I tried Ove's latest package on my N900 it lead to an immediate crash when doing a:

syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

According to Patrick the bug was supposed to be fixed in recent versions so I set up scratchbox and built a newer git snapshot for maemo (sources). This wouldn't crash but didn't show up any items either. It turned out to be a minor bug in calypso returning no content type for REPORT queries which resulted in libneon discarding the whole reply (now already fixed in calypso upstream).

With this out of the way setting up synchronisation is quiet simple:

# Configuration
CALDAV_SERVER=192.168.0.10
syncevolution --configure username=<username> password=<password> \
              calendar/backend=caldav calendar/database=https://${CALDAV_SERVER}:5233/private/my_calendar \
              target-config@webdav calendar
syncevolution --configure --template SyncEvolution_Client sync=none syncURL=local://@webdav username= password= webdav
syncevolution --configure sync=two-way backend=calendar webdav calendar

You should then be able to print the items on the local (N900) and from the remote (CalDAV server) end:

# This lists the current calendar items on the server
syncevolution --print-items target-config@webdav calendar
# This lists the current calendar items on the N900
syncevolution --print-items @default calendar

And from there on sync away:

# initial slow sync
syncevolution --sync slow webdav
# from there on
syncevolution webdav

The syncevolution source code has great documentation about debugging problems (e.g. src/backends/webdav/README). So check that in case you run into problems. The tl;dr version is

SYNCEVOLUTION_DEBUG=1 src/syncevolution loglevel=10 --print-items target-config@webdav calendar

to debug CalDAV related problems. In case you need to run syncevoluton from source be sure to set these beforehand:

export SYNCEVOLUTION_TEMPLATE_DIR=$PWD/src/templates/
export SYNCEVOLUTION_XML_CONFIG_DIR=$PWD/src/syncevo/configs/

On the CalDAV side I used current Calypso git which (with some additional minor fixes) now also interoperates nicely with Iceowl/Icowl-Extension aka Sunbird/Lightning on the desktop side. There's also an ITP for it. So it'll hopefully end up in Debian soon.

Update: in order to do ssl verification with syncevolution/libneon you have to put the CAs certificate to /etc/ssl/certs on the N900 and do a

c_rehash /etc/ssl/certs

otherwise syncevolution won't ve able to verify the server's certificate.