307891 - Repeating events: Interpretation of COUNT in RRULE wrt exception dates

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Calendar :: General, enhancement)

Description

[bellyman]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716

When an event is setup with the number of times, the system automatically counts
exceptions.
ie I have 26 lessons from Sep 22 to Apr 6, and 3 dates are excepted.

Method 1 would be enter Start date, end date, all 3 exceptions.
Method 2 enter Start date, 26 times, 3 exceptions.

The problem is, Method 2 includes the exceptions as part of the 26 times - thus
the end date is short by 3 weeks.  To me the proper count is 26 times EXCLUDING
exceptions.

Depends on how it was thought of during development.  To be clear a toggle-box
beside number of times could be added:
(  ) Number of Times [__]   [X] exclude exceptions in count

Method 1, forces me to go month by month counting to ensure I got my 26 dates. 
Method 2 would be best, but for me shouldn't count the exceptions as part of the
26 times.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Robin Edrenius]

Yeah, this is something I've thought about too.

Confirming as enhancement request.
Moving from Base to Front-End (if this is wrong, please move it back)

Comment 2

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

Unfortunately, I do not have cycles to work on Calendar stuff these days (just as it's getting to the good part!), so I am a bad owner for these bugs.  To delete the tragically-large chunk of bugspam, search for gregorianabdication.

Comment 3

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

From iCalendar specification chapter 3.8.5.1. Exception Date/Times
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-calsify-rfc2445bis-08#section-3.8.5.1

  The final recurrence set is generated by gathering all of the
  start date-times generated by any of the specified "RRULE" and
  "RDATE" properties, and then excluding any start date and times
  specified by "EXDATE" properties.

In my opinion that means that the exception dates should be included in the count and the current behavior is correct. Not including the exception dates as requested in this bug might violate the specification.

Comment 4

[Daniel Boelzle [:dbo]]

I second Stefan's opinion; the current UI directly models the RFC.

If we would follow the above suggestion, you would dynamically expand the series by deleting a single occurrence which looks strange to me. I don't think this is really useful or common. IMO users would commonly shift/override exceptional instances to another date/time.

Comment 5

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

wontfix per last two comments. Lets stick with the spec.