Hello, I'm a KDE Plasma 5 user from China and have been using KDE since KDE 4. I really like what KDE did and would like to improve it if I can. And I'm writing to ask about something I'm trying to work on, about alternate calendar support.
Mainland China users may need to check out the lunar calendar dates together with the Gregorian calendar date. Many calendar applications like the Microsoft Windows 10 built-in calendar and Google calendar both support display the Chinese lunar calendar by setting an alternate calendar. An alternate calendar is a feature to allow another calendar system's date name display together with the main calendar's date names. Currently, the KDE calendar (whatever the plasma DigitalClock plasmoid applet or Calindori) doesn't have alternate calendar support, so I think it can be good if KDE can support alternate calendar so users can be able to set an alternate calendar to display when needed. I also opened a feature request in KDE Bugzilla (here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=429892 ), please also take a look at the Bugzilla report. Since the alternate calendar is not a Chinese-only feature (according to Google calendar app, there are at least 9 different calendar system can be used as the alternate calendar on Google Calendar), I'd like to discuss this feature request on the mailing list to receive some inputs about if we can make such feature into KDE, and if we can, how to implement such feature properly. At this moment I have two ideas: 1. Enhance the current event plugin system and use that for alternate calendar support. Currently, the main problem is, calendar events will never display on the main calendar. To solve this problem, we probably need to add a new event type for the alternate calendar and make the event of the new type be able to display together with the main calendar dates. And maybe we also need to let the plugin selector be able to show the plugins which provide alternate calendar system together so users can be easier to find the plugin for displaying alternate calendar than adding regular calendar events. 2. Make another plugin system dedicated to the alternate calendar feature. Since alternate calendar day names are actually not an event, don't use an event system to support such a feature makes more sense to me. Another not so major issue which using the event plugin cannot solve is, an alternate calendar system also has its own year name and probably other information to display. If there can be a plugin system for the alternate calendar feature, we can also make it display this information just like what other calendar applications did than just date names of an alternate calendar. By the way, I already wrote a simple plasma applet that contains a lunar calendar as an alternate calendar which can be seen here ( https://github.com/BLumia/pineapple-calendar ). It reused the code from plasma-framework so I'm also able to test the possible implementation in that project. While doing resources, I also found KCalendarSystem is pretty well designed but it's in kdelibs4support and I can't found the successor. I also write down my thoughts here and feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iwEwwK9w34ZKOegb8xcecO4u2Pjgv2e7ifXMFKox62Q/edit?usp=sharing , an archived version can be seen in the Bugzilla ticket attachment) Since I'm not familiar with other calendar systems, I'd like to get more inputs on this topic, what do you think about such a feature? Can such a feature be added to KDE? Which approach do you think is better? Any other suggestions? Thanks and have a nice day! Gary.