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. I now consider this code to be near-production-quality; I haven't had any problems I can definitely track down to it for a year (although this release is a significant redesign and may introduce many new bugs on its own; it's worked for me for a week, though). As of BBDB-2.34, it no longer requires any patches to the BBDB. bbdb-expire requires a reasonably recent Gnus (but doesn't require that you *use* Gnus). Thanks to David Bremner for the ideas and code that lay behind many of the new features in this release. User-visible changes since bbdb-expire 1.5: - There's now an initialization function that you call to do all the deep magic hook hacks; requiring the package doesn't affect the behaviour of Emacs greatly anymore. Initialization also modifies the BBDB database for you, adding the fields necessary for the rest of the package to work. - Expiry now takes place automatically, at initialization time and at intervals set by the `bbdb-expire-set-automatic-interval' function; it can be disabled by setting that interval to zero seconds. - A new permanent-field-updating subsystem, from David Bremner, that marks records with addresses matching the `bbdb-expire-permanent-regexp' (or, if nil, addresses in the `bbdb-expire-permanent-file') as permanent. This works via a hook, just like the expiry code. - A new `bbdb-expire-record-noname-p' predicate, from David Bremner. Bug fixes against bbdb-expire 1.5: - bbdb-expire now actually calls the function that updates the `bbdb-display-layout-alist'. (Whoops.) The code is available at <http://www.esperi.demon.co.uk/nix/downloads/bbdb-expire-1.6.tar.gz>. -- `Unless they've moved it since I last checked, travelling between England and America does not involve crossing the equator.' --- pir _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
