Re: org-bbdb: anniversaries with unknown years

[Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com>]

Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> writes:

> On Oct 10, 2010, at 12:15 PM, Christoph Groth wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'd like to keep birthdays and similar dates in bbdb and have them  
>> shown
>> in my org mode agenda views.  Often, however, I do not know the year  
>> of
>> an anniversary, and in the case of my acquaintances the year of a
>> personal anniversary is often not meaningful (e.g. name days,  
>> popular in
>> some countries).
>>
>> The solution that came to my mind was to update org-bbdg.el to also
>> accept dates in the format MM-DD.  org-bbdb-anniv-extract-date would
>> then substitute nil for unknown years.  The remaining code would make
>> sure that "unknown" is substituted for unknown `years'.
>>
>> That solution seems fine, however it would break compatibility with  
>> the
>> old format of org-bbdb-anniversary-format-alist, as this assumes  
>> that a
>> numerical value of `years' is always defined.
>>
>> Before writing a patch, I would like to ask for opinions on this.
>
> I am not sure if there are nay other tools which make use of birthdays  
> in bbdb.
>
> I would such an extension useful.
>
> - Carsten


++ on that one. I get funny looks when asking friends what year they
were born in. Not least because I refuse to capitulate to the FaceBook
masses. org-mode might be referred to, jokingly, as Borg-mode in #emacs
but faceBook is a far more powerful force for evil .....