On October 30, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> What would keep "us" (read "the people who develop bbdb") from
> implementing a more orthogonal schema in a flat file? I agree with
As previously pointed out, the current database structure is parsed
as a lisp structure, not unlike reading a binary blob off a disk and
casting it to a file. Arbitrary string parsing in emacs is
(surprisingly for an editor) both awkward and slow, although the
former isn't a user issue and the latter isn't an issue for those of
you with 27.62GHz Pentium 40's with Quantum Computing extensions.
The biggest win with the current situation is that it works quite
well. The biggest loss is that it's somewhat awkward getting data into
and out of the BBDB without being a lisp hacker or using one of the
precoded interfaces. The latter has been addressed to some extent by
things like SyncBBDB and EUDC and the various bbdb-foo things. I will,
yet again, state that I think the best all-round solution here is the
export/import mechanism. I've been playing around with using gnuserv,
since that's something that's too difficult to set up and allows you
to have one emacs session running your BBDB that everything else can
query as necessary - as an alternative to running on single emacs
session, of course! The simplest application of this is to use gnudoit
to run bbdb-search-simple and parse the return value of it, although
that still requires you to hack lisp somewhat; the better solution
would be a {XML|CSV|SQL|TLA} interface which uses this. This can then
be used either directly by utilities such as SyncBBDB to extract
information (or insert it) or using shim programs which dump the data
to apropriately formatted files for import/export elsewhere. There's
already bbdb-merge which will allow you to merge or sync two BBDB
files, btw.
Bottom line is that I should quit waffling about this and actually
implement something. And that I really, really, REALLY don't want BBDB
turning into a SQL application. Or an XML application, come to that.
Finally, some administrivia. Please note two things:
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Cheers,
Waider.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / Yes, it /is/ very personal of me.
Ronan Waide, Technology Non-Consultant, please update your addressbook
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