GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 776161
Backport Google Calendar fixes to 3.18
Last modified: 2016-12-19 13:01:08 UTC
The fixes from bug 771547 and bug 773248 have been backported to e-d-s 3.20. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS uses e-d-s 3.18. Since that means a lot of people are using 3.18, it would be great if someone could backport these fixes there too.
Thanks for a bug report, but I'm sorry, this won't happen. While the two cited bugs contain some fixes, those are not all of them. All those fixes evolved during the time. The 3.18 is dead for upstream, the same as 3.20 is, but as the changes were also tested in the 3.20 environment, then the fixes had been pushed to gnome-3-20 as well and an eds 3.20.6 release had been made.
I don't think we have a very satisfying answer for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users. :( Is it only Google Calendar integration that's broken? Would it be a good option to maybe just disable it if it's not easy to fix it?
Right, there is nothing satisfying for pre-3.20 versions. The issue as such had been mainly observed in the calendar part, which also covers the Tasks. Looking into the statistics of the key usage for one day the last week (see bug #771547 comment #62), it's the CalDAV and Tasks APIs mainly failing. I didn't mention other parts, because those were boring. One would eventually just take the CalDAV and gtasks sources from the most recent evolution-data-server and use them in 3.18., but there are more related changes in the surrounding code, as also the addition of the internal Google auth in 3.20, that it makes it complicated. Not impossible, but just as hard to achieve and properly test, that I hesitate to spend the time on it myself. I'm sorry. If I recall correctly, then the main issue was when the token expired. As I mentioned elsewhere, consider creating a Ubuntu specific Google API key and use them in GNOME Online Accounts (GOA) (set them in the configure time). You can even use already existing from the Ubuntu Online Accounts (UOA) integration, those keys have pretty low usage in compare to those used by GOA. You can find them here: https://git.gnome.org/browse/evolution-data-server/tree/modules/ubuntu-online-accounts/google-calendar.service.in.in?h=gnome-3-18#n18 I mention this option, because this key is used only by the UOA users, thus by the Ubuntu users, and as I mentioned already, it has pretty low usage at the moment, even the key exists for years.