[CalendarServer-users] calendar server or radicale?

[Andre LaBranche]

Hi,

> On Jul 27, 2018, at 2:47 PM, Richard Johnson <raj at mischievous.us> wrote:
> 
> I guess it's a non-issue, once I get APNS going as well.

Unfortunately, APNS push can’t really be used with the opensource distribution of CalendarServer if you want to push Apple’s Calendar app on macOS or iOS. This is because the push certs needed for the CalendarServer server have an identifier that includes a reference to the name of the entity to whom the cert is issued. Calendar.app only recognizes certs provisioned through a restricted portal used exclusively by macOS Server, which has historically been the primary release vehicle for CalendarServer. The next version of macOS Server will retain the profile manager service and drop all other services. That has been announced and is reflected in the developer seeds of the Mojave-aligned macOS Server release. In the current GM macOS Server release, these services are still available but hidden in portions of the UI as an additional indicator that they are going away. Since APNS certs have to be renewed annually, I would expect the exclusive macOS Server cert portal to remain operational for existing installations, at least for a while, but probably not indefinitely (I honestly can’t predict how long that might be).

Other calendar clients might support APNS, and if so, CalendarServer should support them, with the caveat that CalendarServer implements what is now considered the legacy and deprecated APNS server auth mechanism that uses x509 certs. The new mechanism (token based) is quite a bit better, and the public developer push portal will probably stop issuing APNS certs at some point, and (the open source distribution of) CalendarServer’s APNS support would be effectively gone at most 365 days later due to inability to renew those certs - unless somebody implements the new APNS server auth mechanism as an open source contribution. Whether or not CalendarServer is what Apple uses internally, the commit history of this repo is an accurate if slow-moving indicator of the maintenance and activity level of the CalendarServer distribution available to you. With my Apple hat on, I can’t share with you what I or anyone else at Apple is doing, but as a matter of public record, you can see the frequency, scope, and percentage of all commits to the open source repo over time from people with Apple addresses.

-dre