It sounds like a bigger job than I really have time to take on at the moment, so I'm afraid I don't think it's worth me learning evolution internals to help you here. (Sorry!)
Still, this sounds absolutely great and I look forward to a grand unified GNOME addressbook. Rock on, -- Andrew Sobala <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 20:47, Ettore Perazzoli wrote: > Hi, > > On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 10:47, Andrew Sobala wrote: > > Something that I think would be really useful for GNOME would be to have > > a "global" address book that can be used by evolution, gnomemeeting, IM > > clients, etc. > > > > The main requirements would be a) to be able to be accessed from any > > application, and b) for an application to be able to add a "custom > > field" for anything that isn't supported already by the address book. > > Yeah, actually this has been the source of some heated internal debates > lately. I have been discussing this with Chris for a while now, and > although we don't have a plan that works right now, we are getting > closer. :-) > > In an ideal world, we want to: > > * Split out Evolution's components (see the UI discussions) so > that we can get rid of the local folder tree. This way we can > stick a list of configured addressbooks in GConf, and other apps > can access it. (We can put the list in GConf right n theow too, but > it would be awkward since we would have to keep that in sync > with the actual representation on disk.) > > * Simplify EBook (the API that Evolution uses to access its > addressbooks) so that it becomes easier to use outside of Evo. > This implies removing some of the cruft and making a nice, > synchronous API that doesn't require the caller to go through > all sorts of pains to use it. Chris posted a prototype of a > possible new EBook API a while ago and he also has some > prototype code on CVS (toshok_syncapi_branch in > addressbook/backend). > > * Give CalClient a similar treatment. > > * Make a package out of the new EBook and CalClient libraries plus > Wombat, and ask for it to be part of the core GNOME platform. > (Of course some renaming would be in order at that point.) > > The main issue is that the last three points might require a large > amount of work (porting the addressbook and the calendar to the new API > could take a while) and we are quite resource-constrained... So maybe > there are other options: > > * Split out the current version of Wombat/EBook/CalClient without > refactoring them, and postpone the rearchitecting of the API to > a later time. Pros: little work, people can have an API pretty > soon. Cons: current APIs are not that nice. > > * Implement a nicer addressbook/calendar API on top of what we > have now and make it available, even though Evolution won't be > using it, at least initially. Pros: we develop nice APIs that > could be used by other apps. Cons: we'll have to maintain two > APIs instead of one and since we won't actually be using the > published APIs they might end up stagnating and getting buggy. > > * Recruit some new Evolution volunteers to do some of the work. > :-) _______________________________________________ evolution-hackers maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
