Re: Moving BBDB to Emacs core

[Roland Winkler]

On Sun Oct 8 2017 Thomas Fitzsimmons wrote:
> As I remember, you've solved the copyright assignment issues for BBDB,
> with BBDB 3.x.  Have you given any thought to packaging it in GNU ELPA,
> or proposing it for inclusion in Emacs itself?  Then installation would
> be smoother or unnecessary.  Including BBDB in Emacs would have the
> extra benefit of satisfying other large packages' dependencies on BBDB
> (e.g., Gnus, EUDC, Org) directly.

Hi Thomas,

I wanted to get in touch with you.  I just merged with master the
uuid branch of BBDB.  I believe the absence of uuids was a
significant bottleneck for letting BBDB interact with other
packages.

The question remains: are there still other bottlenecks?  Overall my
rewrite of BBDB has mostly focused on using BBDB by itself.  I have
paid less attention to the API it provides for other packages.  Are
there right now any features that are missing or ill-designed?
It'll be easier to address this now than later.

I noticed that the function eudc-bbdb-query-internal contains a
comment complaining that bbdb-search ORs its query attributes while
EUDC ANDs them.  Introducing uuids to BBDB required a change of the
BBDB record structure that collided with the rather inflexible
calling sequence of bbdb-search.  So I introduced a more robust
calling sequence for bbdb-search that also allows one to choose OR
or AND when combining search attributes.  (The old calling sequence
is still supported but raises a warning.)

So bbdb-search was another nuisance in the BBDB API, which hopefully
is removed now.  Are there others?

I can also ask this question on the Org mailing list.

One other feature I have been thinking about is the ability to split
BBDB over multiple database files.  With uuids this will be much
easier to implement.  The way I envision the implementation of this
feature should not (significantly) affect the API for other
packages.  But I could miss something.

Otherwise, I agree with you that it will be nice to have at least
the core of BBDB in Emacs itself (not in Elpa) so that other
packages can interact with it.

Coments welcome.

Roland