KDE Jewish/Israeli holiday files: the dev needs our help!

[Stan Goodman]

On Wednesday 19 May 2010 23:30:08 Shlomo Solomon wrote:
> Don't forget the differences out of the country - 2 days for most religious
> holidays (except for Yom Kippur and Purim and Chanuka). Also the 2 days of
> Simchat Torah out of the country are called Simchat Torah and Shmini
> Atzeret (here they're both the same day).
>
> On Wednesday 19 May 2010, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> > >From the Korganizer dev:
> > >
> > > For 4.5 however things are changing.  The KDE holiday region files now
> > > support any KDE calendar system, including Hebrew, so I will be adding
> > > new separate files for the Israeli civil holidays and Jewish religious
> > > holidays in both English and Hebrew.  We can even have separate files
> > > for Orthodox and Western holidays if needed.  I need to get moving with
> > > those files, any help would be appreciated :-)
> > >
> > > basically we need to decide how many different files to split them
> > > into (Civil/Religious, Western/Israeli, English/Hebrew, etc) so users
> > > can choose exactly what they want to display, select which holidays go
> > > into each file, define what the rules are for each holiday, then make
> > > sure the library can cope with the rules.
> >
> > So, first question: how many files are needed? I personally think that
> > a Jewish file (for religious holidays) and an Israeli file (for
> > national holidays) would be enough. As we are a small people, I would
> > even accept an argument that they should both be in a single file.
> > What say you?

If you visit the holidays page of the Jewish Genealogical Society 
<http://www.jewishgen.org/jos/josfest.htm>, you will see that they give the 
date for the first day of multi-day holidays. Once one knows the date of the 
first day of Pesah, for example, he can compute when the second seder is. For 
cases like Shmini Atzeret, if should not be difficult to provide a switch for 
Israel/Diaspora, though it ought to be enough to provide the first day of 
Sukkot, and rely on the user to figure it out. He knows whether he lives here 
or abroad. Look at the preferences window in the Firefox addon Hebrew 
Calendar (which even counts the Omer, calls out the Parasha (with an option 
for Israel or Diaspora).

If KDE wants expertise, they should contact the developer of Kaluach 
<kaluach.net>. They keep me posted by email about both Israeli and Jewish 
holidays. 

It's nice to know that KDE is now asking people's advice about new wrinkles. 
KDE4 might have turned out differently if they had thought of this earlier.

-- 
Stan Goodman
Qiryat Tiv'on
Israel