A few days ago I decided to take modify an existing address display
function. And I started wondering about the zip codes again.
The issue is still undecided. A long time ago I wrote up a patch that
transformed all zip codes into strings and did away with all the
datastructure cruft that is used to validate zip codes. Since the zip
codes were saved as plain text strings, my patch included a new file
version.
Other people claimed this was unnecessary and wanted to add plain
strings as just another datastructure. Therefore, existing records
would not have to be updated. Whenever a new record used the plain
string zip code, however, this would still break older BBDB versions
(which don't know about the change since the file version remains
unchanged). Note that this is how new zip code datastructures were
added in the past, therefore this is the "traditional" way of doing
it. On the downside this keeps the old datastructure cruft in the
files, such that external pieces of software (such as interfaces to
handhelds written outside of Emacs) continue to replicate the zip
datastructure reading and converting to plain string conversion code.
Before doing any more work BBDB related work, I'd like to see this
issue settled. Personally, I'm in favour of the first solution,
obviously. However, in order to do away with the uncertainty, I'd be
happy with any decision at all. So, dear maintainer... :) What is
it going to be? Deliver me from indecision... I know we talked about
this before, Waider, but I don't think anything was actually decided.
I remember faintly that I mailed you and said that we should take the
discussion to the newsgroup. But I never did. :)
Alex.
--
http://www.geocities.com/kensanata/emacs.html
"Emacs 21 will be out when it comes out. No beta available."
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