Re: New completion mode

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> writes:

> On Tue, Apr 18 2006, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>
>> Wishlist: import all bbdb addresses automatically?  Below is the
>> format of my ~/.bbdb.  I have no idea why the many parenthesis, and
>> how older file-version formats look like.
>
> I don't have these parenthesis in my.bbdb file:
>
> ;;; file-version: 6
> ;;; user-fields: (birthday www category expire gnokii)
>
> ["Lars Magne" "Ingebrigtsen" ("Lars M. Ingebrigtsen" "Lars Ingebrigtsen") nil nil nil ("larsi@gnus.org" "bugs@gnus.org" "lmi@gnus.org") ((creation-date . "2003-04-30") (timestamp . "2005-12-18")) nil]
>
>
> But instead of parsing the .bbdb file on your own, you should better
> use BBDB functions, I think.  This expression returns a list of all
> addresses:
>
> (let ((records (bbdb-records))
>       nets)
>   (dolist (i records)
>     (dolist (n (bbdb-record-net i))
>       (push n nets)))
>   nets)

This assume the user still has bbdb installed... which might be good
enough.  If (require 'bbdb) fails, though, and ~/.bbdb exists, I
wonder whether it maybe should read it anyway.

On second thought, it may be simpler to not do anything automatically,
but simply provide a bbdb->ecomplete synching as a separate function,
possibly even in a separate file (to avoid polluting ecomplete.el with
bbdb stuff).

I like how ecomplete seem to get along nicely with bbdb.  There's no
reason for them to compete, they can complement each other.  Although
eventually, I would like Gnus to have bbdb's functionality built-in.
Or even a fraction of it, I only use auto-completing from it.  It is
quite annoying to have to install bbdb separately.