On 18 Jun 2001, Lone Wolf wrote:
> > I'm dreaming about a "there should be only one" addressbook,
>
> No offense, but it seems more like "one size fits all" and that rarely
> ever works right.
>
> Setting "de facto" standards isn't good enough either. If there's no
> RFC (or no IEEE spec) then there's no standard and any way of doing
> things is equally valid.
I will admit that this isn't really true. We don't have the define a
standard. The VCard format allows for having multiple cards in a single
file. This is the format that GnomeCard used.
The problem is the performance issue. If we do it this way then:
a) We either have to keep a copy of the entire file in memory in the
wombat or load the entire file into memory in the wombat and then free it
every time we want to do anything to the database. Including changing,
adding, or deleting cards.
b) When we make a single change we have to write out the entire file
again. We either have to write over it directly which means that if it
crashes the user looses their data, or write out a copy and then move it
into place over the old one. In either case it's a lot of work and in the
second case it uses up twice the disk space.
I will admit that in b) we still don't have good crash recovery, but I'm
hoping to add that. libdb3 supports this. However, the amount of time
that the data is being written is much smaller because the number of bytes
to write out is hugely smaller.
> If a tool that can easily extract the data and parse it into whatever
> format I like is easily created, then why should the evolution folks
> be expected to write the addressbook another way?
Yeah, there are two possibilities for this. You can use db_dump (-p
probably), but the data would need to be massaged a bit. Alternatively,
it would be almost trivial to write an executable that connects to the
wombat and prints out the VCards either as a single file or a bunch of
separate files. Whatever you want.
Thanks,
Chris
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