I've been using BBDB fomr some time now and I have several remarks to
make. They concern Mailing-lists and ftp.
Mailing-lists
As far as I know (1.48), there is no real support for mailing-lists
in BBDB. Yet, it wouldn't be too difficult to have special entries
flagged "mailing-lists", to which you could 's'ubscribe on
'u'nsubscribe with a simple key. Then BBDB would take you to mail
composition with headers filled with values specified in special
fields. For example, you would have
info-bbdb - Mailing-list
net: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
subscribe: Subscribe - Please subscribe me to this mailing-list
unsubscribe: Unsubscribe - Please unsubscribe me from this mailing-list
Pressing 's' on this entry would take you to the mail-composition
buffer :
To: bbdb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Subscribe
----------------------------
Please subscribe me to this mailing-list
and a mere \C-c\C-c would do the trick (this could even be automatic).
ftp
I'd like to use ftp with BBDB but right now, I'm using a trick that
is far more efficient. If such a trick could be adapted to BBDB (no
clues how), I would gladly use BBDB here again.
There exists a package called "registry" which lets you call
filenames with short names. For example, I have registered "~/.emacs"
as "em", and I can load my .emacs file by just "popping" (\C-c\C-f is
the default binding) to the file "em" (this is a bad example since
the pathname is short, but you get the idea).
I extended this concept to using ange-ftp. For example, I have the
following registration record :
"[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/pub/tcl" "tcltk"
and popping to "tcltk" will immediately dired the given directory. So
far, I haven't been able to find a simpler way to connect to a ftp
site. I hope this can be done with BBDB (a good start might be to be
able to use abbreviations for ftp sites).
More generally
The existence of additions like bbdb-ftp or bbdb-print prove that
"when you have a bbdb record, you have the power". I mean, BBDB
records give you a minimal, and yet vital, information that can let
you do a tremendous number of things. An interesting one -- but yet
unexplored -- had been given on this list by someone who was
wondering about the ability to use BBDB records to generate letters.
I'm sure some great things will come out of all this (and xmh users
will never know what they lose :-)).
Cedric
"Like it or not, like what you got,
You're under the soil,"
