ICalendar-duration

[HenningCode]

Hello,
I would like to implement icalendar-duration and have a few questions in advance.
Why are durations always converted to seconds?
The package icalendar-duration has no possibility to create durations directly. It would always be necessary to use a string. One possibility would be to create your own struct and use icalendar-duration only as a parser.
What is your opinion on this?

[hoodie]

Hi @HenningCode, thanks for wanting to contribute.
Where do mean durations are converted into seconds?
The Duration type that this crate uses is the one provided by chrono: chrono::Duration. AFAIK icalendar-duration (which is not related to this crate) uses time::Duration. I think both might be even be converation Into and From std::time::Duration.
So you can construct them with their respective builders and don't have to parse a string.

RFC 5545 uses iso8601 durations. There are also other parsers for this, for instance iso8601, which we use here.

What exactly would you like to implement?

[HenningCode]

So I am currently trying to build a TUI to create calendars and I am using your package as my backend. It's working really well apart from reconstructing alarms. If an event has a trigger with e.g. -P1D the iso8601 package fails to parse this because of the minus sign. I wanted to change this behaviour with the introduction of the icalendar-duration package which is able to parse this out of the box.

I meant by converting to seconds, that if I create an alarm with Trigger::before_start(Duration::days(1)) it gets written as -PT86400S. I think this should be changed to be written as -P1D.

Edit: To be more clear about parsing with the minus sign. I wanted to use the try_from method of Trigger, which I think should be able to parse such common values out of the box.

[hoodie]

sounds good. Now I know what you mean with "converted to seconds". I think I just implemented it that way to simplify the logic. Ulitmately the duration has the same length, but you are right, storing a day as a day is nicer.

[MiPnamic]

I understood that's a chrono/TimeDelta limitation, it doesn't support what they called "nominal" representation for days and months.

I actually found a temporary solution by using iso8601-duration where a:
Duration::new(0., 0., 1., 0., 0., 0.); get translated to the expected P1D.