Debian Maintainer Dashboard now provides iCalendar feeds

Contributors to Debian can now monitor their list of pending activities using iCalendar clients on their desktop or mobile device.

Thanks to the tremendous work of the Debian QA team, the Ultimate Debian Database has been scooping up data from all around the Debian universe and storing it in a PostgreSQL back-end. The Debian Maintainer Dashboard allows developers to see a summary of outstanding issues across all their packages in a range of different formats.

With today's update, an aggregated list of Debian tasks and to-dos can now be rendered in iCalendar format and loaded into a range of productivity tools.

Using the iCalendar URL

Many productivity tools like Mozilla Lightning (Iceowl extension on Debian) allow you to poll any calendar or task list just using a URL.

For UDD iCalendar feeds, the URLs look like this:

https://udd.debian.org/dmd/?format=ics&email1=daniel%40pocock.pro

You can also get the data by visiting the Debian Maintainer Dashboard, filling out the form and selecting the iCalendar output format.

Next steps

Currently, the priority and deadline attributes are not set on any of the tasks in the feed. The strategy of prioritizing issues has been raised in bug #777112.

iCalendar also supports other possibilities such as categories and reminders/alarms. It is likely that each developer has their own personal preferences about using these features. Giving feedback through the Debian QA mailing list or the bug tracker is welcome.

Screenshots