Re: eudc conversion to bbdb (in bbdb3.1.2?)

[Eric Abrahamsen]

"Roland Winkler" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Wed Nov 18 2015 Barak A. Pearlmutter wrote:
>> But this does bring up a deeper issue, namely exposing a
>> documented stable bbdb API might be a good idea.
>
> The question is what kind of scenarios the API is supposed to cover.
> I have never thought in much detail about this question.  
>
> - This thread started with how EUDC interacts with BBDB.  Is there a
>   list of other packages to be considered here?
>
> - Are we talking about interactive and / or non-interactive
>   applications interacting with BBDB ("interactive" in the sense of
>   elisp `interactive')?
>
> - What should an interface look like for searching records in the
>   database for non-interactive applications?  The macro bbdb-search
>   can possibly be further improved.
>
> - Exporting / importing individual fields for a given record already
>   has a stable interface via bbdb-record-field and
>   bbdb-record-set-field.
>
> - Exporting complete records: is bbdb-record-field sufficient for
>   that purpose?
>
> - Currently there is only little support for importing complete
>   records (possibly following a previous export).  A major issue are
>   imported records that should be merged with existing records.
>   Currently BBDB uses elisp `eq' to recognize equal records which is
>   an approach that can fail in many ways.  Adding a UUID field to
>   every record that gets exported and imported would make this more
>   robust.  (We talked about this before, and it is on my agenda,
>   though lately my time has been limited.)
>
> - Is there something else?

I might add to this a clearer API for the "noticing" functionality of
BBDB -- ie, make it easier to write the hooks for "doing things to BBDB
records when you receive mails from/compose mails to those records.

Eric