On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Roland Winkler <wink...@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> I thought more about this, and I do not believe anymore that simply
> replacing calls of (buffer-)substring with (buffer-)substring-no-properties
> throughout BBDB is a meaningful strategy.
>
> - In the future, it could be meaningful to deliberately introduce
> text properties into BBDB (here, I mean the database itself).
> So IMO BBDB should not remove text properties when operating on
> text strings originating from BBDB --unless these strings are passed on
> to an application for which it is known that it cannot handle text
> properties.
>
Hm I cannot argue that having text properties in BBDB is a bad idea for all
of eternity. But at the moment I cannot see any use for such - for two
reasons:
(a) The "True Origin" of the text is not known (I mean, it is either from a
minibuffer, or a MUA, but could conceivably be a script or whatever). The
properties that come with a piece of text today come with whatever that
property means at the point of origin. BBDB makes no promises to retain or
return such properties.
(b) A fontified contact name has no counterpart in any contact manager that
I am familiar with.
> - Once BBDB starts using text properties deliberately, there should
> also be a user option that inhibits that text properties ever
> enter the database itself. This option will have to be implemented
> rather low-level, where text strings "are really added to the
> database".
>
> Yet all the text processing in between the grabbing of text
> strings and adding them to the database should preserve text
> properties.
Makes a lot of sense. And we could do all this even before we come up with
any real use of having text properties in the database, making it more
flexible but keeping the database format more predictable for those who
desire it to be so.
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