Benjamin Rutt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I have been using the bbdb for about two months now and I feel like I
> am using it wrong. I spend all my time tweaking the
> bbdb-ignore-some-messages-alist for email addresses I don't want
> noticed, to protect them from being automatically added (I have that
> turned on for gnus mail groups). I also spend a lot of time manually
> deleting ??? entries (ones without a name) from the bbdb. I feel that
> this is wrong because I'll be doing this manual cleaning and updating
> for the rest of my life using this plan.
This is one of the things I wrote expire-bbdb for; you can ignore the
crap if it only appears once, because it'll just get expired away. (You
end up with a *lot* of crap after a few years; expiry's just kicked in
here for the first time, and it's thrown away 3/4 of my bbdb records at
once :) )
> So rather than having to keep my bbdb "clean", I would like there to
> be a way so that my frequent contacts bubble up to the top, so
Ooo, nice idea.
> whenever I M-x bbdb RET RET I can see the frequent contacts near the
> top, and all the people I hear from infrequently are near the end
> (where "frequent" is defined as how often bbdb notices the net
> address). That way, it will still be useful to browse the bbdb.
Hmmmm.... *thinks*
> Any suggestions here? Is there any way to specify the sort order of
> bbdb records when you are browsing in M-x bbdb ? I saw something
> interesting from Nix on gnu.emacs.sources (expire-bbdb.el I think)
Yep, a bad name. It should be called bbdb-expire.el, and I may well
rename it --- only that would annoy existing users slightly...
> that might touch on some of this (i.e. it added a timestamp field
> IIRC) but the warnings scared me away.
It looks quite tricky to change the sort order of records in the
database, but luckily we don't need to change that; we just need to
change the display order, and that can be done by redefining the
function `bbdb-record-sortkey' --- although we cannot advise it, we must
redefine it.
We'd also need a `noticed-frequency' field, hidden with
`bbdb-elided-display' and updated from the bbdb-notice-hook, in the same
sort of way as the `last-access' field is updated in expire-bbdb.el ---
and with similar horrible kludges, because the notice hook gets called a
lot --- e.g., when updating records, as well as when looking at them,
and because we don't want updates to the noticed-frequency field to
update the list of changed records (which governs the !! thing in the
modeline of modified records; if we didn't frob that, every single
record we saw would always be marked modified.)
It looks like it's sufficiently similar to expire-bbdb.el that they
should both be handled by the same sort of (kludgy) machinery. I may
generalize that machinery into a library that both expire-bbdb.el and
the sort-frequency thing call.
The other interesting part is what criteria to use to decide when to
update the noticed-frequency field. You don't want to do it all the time
because you probably don't want it to apply e.g. to records noticed in
newsgroups. I think a predicate list along the lines of the
`bbdb-expire-expiry-functions' in expire-bbdb.el would serve.
I think I'll do that refactoring work to expire-bbdb.el, rename it, and
write this. Thanks for the suggestion :)
--
`Normally, we don't do people's homework around here, but Venice
is a very beautiful city, so I'll make a small exception.'
--- Robert Redelmeier compromises his principles
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