The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to gnu.emacs.sources as well. The BBDB is a wonderful, flexible magic address book, but if you use it to keep track of people's drifting identities on the Usenet, the database tends to get clogged with a huge number of almost completely useless entries for one-time posters, spammers, rarely-seen fly-by-nighters and so forth. This leads to huge BBDB databases, which is a waste of disk space, a (tiny) waste of time, and just plain messy. Ideally, entries in the BBDB would expire the way Usenet groups do; this code implements exactly that, and then some. Currently, this code is in beta; it is fragile (relying as it does on a BBDB patch), wobbly, byzantine and overly manual (you have to tell it to expire by hand, as no hook within the BBDB is suitable)... but it provides a feature that is not presently available in any other way, and in time, the ugly misfeatures will go away. (I hope.) User-visible changes since bbdb-expire 1.3: - Ported to BBDB-2.32: Expunged ugly hacks to keep timestamp updates from firing change hooks and affecting changed-record flags; instead, used a patch to the BBDB itself. - Fixed some astonishingly stupid typos; all the functions are really documented now. (bbdb-expire 1.2 was not publically released; it moved most of the astonishing ugliness needed to keep timestamp updates to BBDB records from being noticed out of bbdb-expire and into another file, `bbdb-hidden-update', which is no longer needed.) User-visible changes since bbdb-expire 1.1: - You can now choose to expire records, and preserve records through expiry, in arbitrarily complex ways, through the variables `bbdb-expire-expiry-functions' and `bbdb-expire-preservation-functions'. There is a macro `bbdb-expire-field-foo-p' which creates predicates to put on these hooks to force expiry or preservation if specific fields are present. - Records with a "notes" field are no longer expired. The code is available at <http://www.esperi.demon.co.uk/nix/downloads/bbdb-expire-1.4.tar.gz>. -- `> You never need to use # for anything, either? Not to date, but # would suffice if I did.' -- Stig Brautaset espouses uniquely effective ways of protecting HTML from #-stripping preprocessors _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
