Notes on Standard Compliance

khal tries to follow standards and RFCs (most importantly RFC 5545 iCalendar) whereever possible. Known intentional and unintentional deviations are listed below.

Events with neither END nor DURATION

While the RFC states

A calendar entry with a “DTSTART” property but no “DTEND” property does not take up any time. It is intended to represent an event that is associated with a given calendar date and time of day, such as an anniversary. Since the event does not take up any time, it MUST NOT be used to record busy time no matter what the value for the “TRANSP” property.

khal transforms those events into all-day events lasting for one day (the start date). As long a those events do not get edited, these changes will not be written to the vdir (and with that to the CalDAV server). Any timezone information that was associated with the start date gets discarded.

Note

While the main rationale for this behaviour was laziness on part of the main author of khal, other calendar software shows the same behaviour (e.g. Google Calendar and Evolution).