Re: eudc conversion to bbdb (in bbdb3.1.2?)

["Roland Winkler" <winkler@gnu.org>]

On Wed Nov 18 2015 Barak A. Pearlmutter wrote:
> But this does bring up a deeper issue, namely exposing a
> documented stable bbdb API might be a good idea.

The question is what kind of scenarios the API is supposed to cover.
I have never thought in much detail about this question.  

- This thread started with how EUDC interacts with BBDB.  Is there a
  list of other packages to be considered here?

- Are we talking about interactive and / or non-interactive
  applications interacting with BBDB ("interactive" in the sense of
  elisp `interactive')?

- What should an interface look like for searching records in the
  database for non-interactive applications?  The macro bbdb-search
  can possibly be further improved.

- Exporting / importing individual fields for a given record already
  has a stable interface via bbdb-record-field and
  bbdb-record-set-field.

- Exporting complete records: is bbdb-record-field sufficient for
  that purpose?

- Currently there is only little support for importing complete
  records (possibly following a previous export).  A major issue are
  imported records that should be merged with existing records.
  Currently BBDB uses elisp `eq' to recognize equal records which is
  an approach that can fail in many ways.  Adding a UUID field to
  every record that gets exported and imported would make this more
  robust.  (We talked about this before, and it is on my agenda,
  though lately my time has been limited.)

- Is there something else?

Roland