On July 5, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> Do people have opinions on what they think the 'ideal' system
> would be? For what it's worth, I'm not overly attached to my conduit
from my point of view:
- I use PilotManager (well, not at the moment; it's having some basic
disagreements with Perl 5.6...), so something that plugs into
PilotManager is always a good thing IMHO. On the other hand, there's
a bunch of KDE tools out there to play with the pilot, and GNOME
tools, and some stuff in Java... you get the picture.
- My BBDB runs constantly from when I log in to when I log out. Thus
it's not feasible for me to use something other than emacs to write
to the bbdb, because then I'll have conflicts between on-disk and
in-memory data.
- Bringing these two points together led me to my current belief that
the best way to manage this is to provide the BBDB with a generic
merge/sync framework - which I've done an amount of work on - and
then allow whatever app you want to talk to that, probably through
gnuclient. This probably requires you to use an independant
gnuclient distro since the last time I checked, emacsclient as
distributed with GNUmacs was restricted to opening files
only. gnuclient will allow you to remotely run arbitrary chunks of
lisp, which is ideal for syncing.
The current AddressBook conduit on PilotManager allows you to choose
one of several output formats. Perhaps a gnuclient option could be
added to get it to talk to bbdb and do record matching.
> This an attractive idea, thoughts on how to avoid having to do a
> full sync (transfer the whole address book from the palm) every time
> to perform the merge? How is record matching being accomplished
> (given that names/email addresses are no longer unique :).
Yep: You need to do one full sync to get everything in line, and part
of that full sync is to store the pilot record IDs in the BBDB. For
records that need to be split, the code generates a fake pilot ID and
adds that to the record in question so your ID field might have
multiple ID's in it. Or you can manually split the record and have
each with a unique ID. In matching up the records, the code does what
I've tagged as an "intertwingle match" - see jwz's description of
intertwingle at
http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/intertwingle.html - but
essentially it tries to match on email + name before it tries anything
else. I'd have to look at the code again, but I think it had fallbacks
from that to try and get matches in other ways.
Anyway.
Once you've done the full sync and edited either side to your heart's
content, you should just be able to do a regular sync, with the ID
fields providing you with a link from pilot to BBDB.
No, it's not perfect. I did consider rewriting the Pilot addressbook
to be more like the BBDB...
Cheers,
Waider.
--
Ronan Waide, Technology Consultant
StepStone, #102 Block 4, Harcourt Centre, Harcourt Rd, Dublin 2, Ireland
Tel: +353 (0)1 2944077 Fax: +353 (0)1 2944078 http://www.stepstone.ie/
_______________________________________________
bbdb-info mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/bbdb-info
