"Roland Winkler" <wink...@gnu.org> writes: > > When my updates of BBDB were in a pre-alpha stage and I did not yet > have a detailed roadmap where they would take me, I thought that > there was really not much of a point trying to continuously (at each > intermediate stage) preserve backward compatibility when it would > have been possible.
I appreciate all the work you have done to freshen up bbdb! I, too, have some reservations about the extent of some of the name changes. For instance, the new bbdb breaks org-mode's bbdb module, which is part of GNU Emacs. Some of the breakage can be fixed with defaliases: e.g., (defalias 'bbdb-company 'bbdb-search-organization) (defalias 'bbdb-name 'bbdb-search-name) But other changes require a more complicated workaround. For instance, org-bbdb calls bbdb-split, which used to have arguments in the following order: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- (defun bbdb-split (string separators) --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- The order above makes sense to me, since it is the conventional order of parameters for split-string functions in emacs. But the new bbdb reverses the order of the argument, thus breaking compatibility with org-bbdb.el: --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- (defun bbdb-split (separator string) --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Another issue: bbdb-record-note is not as comprehensive as the bbdb-record-getprop; i.e., it only works for some fields. I'd be happy to work on org-bbdb, but since there will likely be users of bbdb 2.35 for a very long time, workarounds will be a bit tricky. Similarly I imagine many emacs users have this hook in their .emacs: (add-hook 'message-setup-hook 'bbdb-define-all-aliases) If these users upgrade to the newest bbdb, message buffer setup will fail, since the name of the function has been changed to bbdb-get-mail-aliases. > Now that the new code has reached a more mature stage, it could make > sense to look over it once more for things like defaliases. (Yet this > might require checking things more carefully, as I also tried to make > the behavior of BBDB more consistent both with respect to differents > parts of BBDB as well as compared with other packages of emacs.) If we are going to break backwards compatibility, perhaps we should provide a clear list and explanation of all the changes on bbdb home page. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help. Best, Matt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and publish websites with WebMatrix Use the most popular FREE web apps or write code yourself; WebMatrix provides all the features you need to develop and publish your website. http://p.sf.net/sfu/ms-webmatrix-sf _______________________________________________ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
