journeyThe self-hosted calendaring solution I had been trying to set up turned out not to work due to an incompatibility between my Android phone and the CalDAV client I tried to run on it. My options at this point consisted of
- upgrading the firmware in my phone to Ice Cream Sandwich or higher
- buying a new phone
- porting the CalDAV Adapter to the unofficial and unsupported APIs
- choosing a different calendaring solution
My handset is a Geeksphone One - a sturdy little machine well supported by Cyanogen Mod yet simply too weak to handle anything beyond 2.3.x. It's condemned to stay in the Gingerbread zombie army until I retire it. Buying a new phone is plausible in the mid- to long-term but I do want a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Looks like I'll have to overcome my allergy to Sony.
I looked into back-porting the CalDAV adapter to the unofficial APIs available in Gingerbread. It seemed like a ton of work with dubious benefits - especially when I found out the work had already been done. You see, the adapter I'd been working with (written by Gérald Garcia) was not the only one I'd found - there is also another adapter written by Marten Gajda which I hadn't considered since it isn't distributed as open-source. It does work under Gingerbread, however, which made a proper impression on me given everything I knew at this stage.
I ended up doing something I hadn't done in years - I purchased and installed a piece of closed-source software. One thing that convinced me was Marten's website which is simple and sticks to the point; the same can be said of the software. Unfortunately, even with a bona-fide polished product on the Android side it wasn't smooth sailing. I had a Radicale instance installed on my notebook for debugging and it talked to the adapter just fine - unlike the home server. Both were running Radicale 0.7 by this point so I compared their OS-specific patches (using apt-get src on my Debian notebook and the ports tree on the OpenBSD home server). One of the Debian patches added automatic creation of calendars which was lacking in the OpenBSD version (this functionality is mentioned in current Radicale documentation but that supposedly refers to 0.7.1; the experiment with Mozilla Lightning in part 3 had worked because the Debian version was involved). Porting the patch and installing from ports was a matter of minutes. After that, everything worked like a charm.