237901 - add webcal protocol to iCalendar output link

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Query/Bug List, enhancement)

Description

[William Jon McCann]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8

While working on bug 235459, I realized that there are two useful modes for
working with iCalendar files.  Users may wish to either import the TODO list or
subscribe to it.  Bug 235459 added import ability to the html buglist template.  

We could also make it easy to subscribe to the TODO list by using the "webcal:"
protocol in the iCalendar link.

I'll provide a patch to add this.

Dave Miller expressed some concern over the performance impact of such a feature
in bug 235459 comment #51.  We should look into that.

Subscribing to buglists has some nice benefits.  It uses bugzilla more like a
backend system than a UI.  This is very nice for non-tech or novice users who
can use a PIM as a front end (currently read-only) for buglists/task-lists and
automatically receive updates.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[William Jon McCann]

Attachment: patch to have both download and subscribe links

Comment 2

[William Jon McCann]

I'm not sure of the best way to do user authentication here.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

For what it's worth, it is currently possible to subscribe manually in most
calendar programs by right-clicking on the iCalendar link and doing Copy Link
Location, then invoking Subscribe manually in the calendar program and pasting
the link in.

We need to start looking at cleaner ways to display the links at the bottom of
the buglist page before we add too many more links down there...  it's starting
to get cluttered.

Comment 4

[Luis Villa]

Dave: you can, but it's a PITA. Realistically, the 'raw' http://.ics file isn't
very useful to anyone- I'd suggest if you're worried about link clutter, kill
the http:// link and just use webcal://.

Comment 5

[William Jon McCann]

For this feature to work with all bugzilla installations bugzilla needs to
support one of the standard user authentication mechanisms (like Basic Auth). 
This is because some installations use the "requirelogin" parameter.

The "http://" link works without this capability because the user would have to
authenticate (in the BZ proprietary way) to see that link at all.  Clicking the
link would allow the user to download or import the task list - which is a
non-recurring action.

The "webcal://" link is different because the URL is used directly by a calendar
program to periodically read and update the task list.  Each time the webcal
link is read by the calendar program the user must be authenticated.

Currently, BZ will redirect the request to a proprietary login page that no
calendar program will know what to do with.  It is possible to encode the login
name and password in the URL but this is very insecure.

So, if BZ supported HTTP Basic Auth this would be a trivial and extremely useful
feature to add.

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning bugs that I'm not actively working on to the default component owner
in order to try to make some sanity out of my personal buglist.  This doesn't
mean the bug isn't being dealt with, just that I'm not the one doing it.  If you
are dealing with this bug, please assign it to yourself.