Re: [ELPA] Package proposal: EBDB

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:

>>>>>> "EA" == Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
> EA> I wasn't thinking of ELPA as "inclusion into Emacs", but maybe that's what
> EA> it is?
>
> Yes, that's what certainly it's intended to be/mean, from my point of view.

Good to know.

I guess my arguments for the package are pretty much what I stated
earlier, then. The present BBDB is limited in that record fields are
just key-value pairs, for the most part strings. If you want to add a
new type of field, you need to add branches to about a dozen `cond'
statements throughout the BBDB codebase. In EBDB, new field types can be
added via an external library. Likewise, the behavior of existing fields
(and records and databases) can be altered with external libraries. EBDB
fields can have arbitrarily complex data slots and behavior.

Records can be of different types. People and organizations are built
in, other record types can be added. Databases are likewise
subclass-able.

I think EBDB's internationalization framework is important. BBDB is
fairly US-centric. EBDB can provide very fine-grained behavior for
phones, addresses and names from various countries/locales/scripts. I
have so far only scratched my own itch, with a China-specific library,
but all the hooks are there.

At present EBDB has some advantages (like multiple databases, record
UUIDs, multiple buffers) that could be added to BBDB as well. But I
think the points above are things that could not be reasonably added to
BBDB as it stands: that was the point of the rewrite.

Eric