I'm looking at the rather trivial task of getting BBDB to properly
parse what I'll disparagingly refer to as Outlook-format names,
whereby my own moniker is rendered "Waide, Ronan". The basic problem
is making sure that you also do the right thing with "John Smith, Sr"
- i.e. that it doesn't get mutated into "Sr John
Smith". mail-extract-address-components has a ton of code to handle
this and similar circumstances, including such sillines as ham codes,
SCA stuff, a whole mess of titles, and so forth. The problem being
that mail-extract-address-components will only parse the first address
you give it, and discard all the rest; and sometimes,
mail-extract-address-components doesn't parse out the name correctly.
My options are
(1) reinvent the wheel, which is sort of what
bbdb-extract-address-components is doing at the moment;
(2) fix mail-extr and bundle the fixed version with BBDB, which is,
AFAIK, what used happen
(3) Use bbdb-extract-address-components as a front-end to clean up and
separate the addresses, and then use
mail-extract-address-components to actually do the smart stuff.
It seems like (3) would be the best option, although it does mean
discarding a variable that some people might have already customised
by themselves. I'd be willing to take on (2) if I thought there was a
chance of getting the changes folded into the official mail-extr.el,
but since the file hasn't, apparently, been touched since 1997 I feel
that perhaps that may be a little futile. And I think (1) is
definitely the wrong approach, because we're largely duplicating both
the effort and the experience that has gotten mail-extr to handle the
amount of weirdness that it does.
So. I am going to go ahead with option 3, with the intention of making
it easy enough to roll my inventions into mail-extr as a stab at
option 2, and once it's working I'll offer it to the appropriate
people as a "New, Improved!"[1] version for consideration. If anyone
has major problems with this, please do speak up.
I'm a lousy dictator, it appears.
Waider.
[1] "you mean I've been using Old and Inferior all along?"
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / Yes, it /is/ very personal of me.
"It's too bad that most people don't get the fact that an object-oriented
programming style has exactly nothing to do with the programming
language you use." - Jamie Zawinski
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