Re: RFC: Adding BBDB to Emacs core

[Joshua Branson <jbranso@fastmail.com>]

That sounds pretty awesome, but does the bbdb package have any info
documentation?  Not that it really matters, but it would be nice to have.

Also, may I ask about ebdb?  Does ebdb ever have
a chance at making emacs core?

P.S.  I'm not a developer (at least not yet).  Just curious.


Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim@fitzsim.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Now that BBDB is copyright clear and available in GNU ELPA, thanks to
> Roland Winkler, I'd like to see what people think about also adding it
> to Emacs core.
>
> While maintaining EUDC in Emacs core, I've encountered many references
> to BBDB that are unresolved.  The only reason for this, as far as I can
> tell, is that historically BBDB's copyright status didn't allow it to be
> included in core.  Otherwise it probably would have been included all
> along.  Now it's possible to fix this properly.
>
> I've started an integration attempt on the scratch/eudc-bbdb-3 branch.
> I merged a recent version of BBDB from GNU ELPA into lisp/bbdb, then I
> resolved references to BBDB in EUDC.  For example, we can remove things
> like:
>
>    (declare-function bbdb-record-phones "ext:bbdb" t) ; via bbdb-defstruct
>
> and apply changes like:
>
> --- a/lisp/net/eudc-export.el
> +++ b/lisp/net/eudc-export.el
> @@ -31,10 +31,8 @@
>  ;;; Code:
>
>  (require 'eudc)
> -
> -;; NOERROR is so we can compile it.
> -(require 'bbdb nil t)
> -(require 'bbdb-com nil t)
> +(require 'bbdb)
> +(require 'bbdb-com)
>
>  (defun eudc-create-bbdb-record (record &optional silent)
>    "Create a BBDB record using the RECORD alist.
>
> This makes the code cleaner and easier to maintain.  We can also rely
> only on the version of BBDB in GNU Emacs (or a later one in GNU ELPA)
> and so all the BBDB < 3 compatibility code can be deleted without risk
> of breaking people's package sets (BBDB >= 3 auto-converts BBDB < 3
> databases to the updated format).
>
> I think applying this same type of effort to the other BBDB-dependent
> core packages would simplify them too.
>
> I'd like BBDB to become the default out-of-the-box local contact
> management library for GNU Emacs, in particular so that Gnus/EUDC/BBDB
> work together to provide email completion and snarfing out-of-the-box,
> without extra configuration or package installation.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thomas