As you probably know, Shashwat Jolly and Nour E-Din El-Nhass are working on native EteSync support support for both KDE and GNOME (Evolution) during this year's Google Summer of Code, and John Bieling (creator of TbSync) is working on a native Thunderbird add-on (delayed due to COVID-19). After these projects are finished, users of the above desktop clients won't need the DAV bridge any more, and can just use EteSync directly!

However, we are still improving the DAV bridge as it is still needed for applications where EteSync can't be, supported natively such as Contacts.app (macOS) and Outlook (Windows).

As for the DAV bridge: we made a few nice improvements, and we have an important update to share on an issue that may affect some users.

Radicale v3 issue

The desktop DAV bridge utilises Radicale (an open source DAV server) under the scenes. After a long time without a release, Radicale has now released version 3! This released changed quite a few things with both how the app works and the plugin system, which unfortunately breaks the DAV bridge too.

We still haven't managed to assess exactly how much we need to change to adapt to these changes. We have more than a few changes that can (and should) be merged into Radicale, but we are unfortunately unable to reach the devs and our PRs have been ignored so far. If you know any of the Radicale devs, pleaes let us know, as we would love to chat with them!

What does it actually mean for users of the DAV bridge? If you are using the prebuilt binaries, the Docker images or running it in your own python environment: you are unaffected. If you are using a Linux distribution that hasn't updated to Radicale v3 yet, you are fine too. The only people affected are the ones using distributions (such as Arch) which have already updated to the latest Radicale.

In case you are affected, there are a few workarounds you can employ. You can find more information and tune in for updates in the relevant ticket.

Fixed address books showing as calendars

There is a bug in Radicale that was causing address books to show as calendars, task lists and note collections in addition to address books, only in Evolution. For the longest time we assumed it was an issue with Evolution. Today, after spending a lot of time with the Evolution developers we realised it was actually a bug in Radicale. We finally added a workaround for this issue, and it's now been fixed.

Made the sync much faster

In addition to previously making the sync run asynchronously, we now made it much faster by only fetching collections that have actually changed instead of checking all of them every time. This makes sync much faster and also saves battery life on laptops.

Made packaging easier

The DAV bridge is being packaged for more distributions every day (more on that in a future post), and we have been working with package maintainers on making sure packaging is as easy as it should be. As part of that we managed to remove our dependency on pyscrypt, so there's no one less dependency for packagers to worry about! If you would like to package the DAV bridge for your favourite distro, let us know, and we may be able to help.

As usual, we would like to remind you that we rely on your feedback  and contributions to make EteSync better. Do you have any suggestions or  are experiencing any issues? Please send patches, report issues or just contact us.

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