DBus interface for meeting creation

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 13 Mar 2018 at 13:11:45 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> We need to spawn a "new meeting" editor in the client of the user's
> choice, pre-populated with meeting dial-in information, conference-
> specific attendees, etc.

Rather than inventing a small subset of iCalendar encoded into
D-Bus parameters, would it perhaps make sense to implement this as
a MIME-type handler for iCalendar files, or by sending an iCalendar
blob over D-Bus, or by documenting a somewhat lossless transformation
of iCalendar into a D-Bus data structure in the same way that
https://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec/Connection_Interface_Contact_Info.html
works with a lossless transformation of a vCard?

> I've implemented a plugin for Evolution which supports this:
> 
> dbus-send --print-reply --dest=im.pidgin.event_editor \
>        /im/pidgin/event_editor im.pidgin.event_editor.CreateEvent \
>        string:"Organizer <dwmw2 at infradead.org>" \
>        string:"Meeting summary" \
>        string:"Meeting location" \
>        string:"Meeting description" \
>        array:string:attendee1 at example.org,attendee2 at example.org

This is (presumably) fine for Lync, but as a standardized protocol I
think you'll need extensibility: if a different protocol has a different
idea of what is in a meeting invitation, then you'll need a way to
include fields that wouldn't have appeared in a Lync meeting invitation.

    smcv