Is BBDB really that bad?

Is BBDB really that bad?

[Jarl Friis]

Hi I just tried out BBDB as an addressbook.

I tried 2.32 as that was installed on my system.

By entering my own addres I figured out that many design-decisions was
made under the assumption that we all live in USA. It makes it more or
less useless to me, is that really so?

It stores entries in a lisp-like file ~/.bbdb, has anybody considered
to make an interface to a Relational Databse Management System before?

Can someone say if some of these issues have been resolved in earlier
versions of BBDB?

Jarl

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[Adam Sjøgren]

On 30 Sep 2002 20:57:41 +0200, Jarl Friis wrote:

> By entering my own addres I figured out that many design-decisions
> was made under the assumption that we all live in USA. It makes it
> more or less useless to me, is that really so?

It isn't useless to me, although I mostly use it as a glorified
email-database.

Example:

 David Pisinger - DIKU
           Phone: 35 32 13 54
            Work: Datalogisk Institut
                  Universitetsparken 1
                  DK-2100 Copenhagen
                  Denmark
             net: pisinger@diku.dk

Doesn't look USA-centric to me.

The only configuration option a quick glance reveals concerning
centricity issues is this one:

 (setq bbdb-north-american-phone-numbers-p nil)

> It stores entries in a lisp-like file ~/.bbdb, has anybody
> considered to make an interface to a Relational Databse Management
> System before?

I bet you're the first - go for it!

(My bbdb is so small (~20 KB) it would be ridiculous to waste time
putting it in a database and having Gnus connect to it all the time).

> Can someone say if some of these issues have been resolved in
> earlier versions of BBDB?

I think you mean "later versions". I'm using 2.35.


  Best regards,

-- 
 "Ok, so we didn't learn any big lesson. Sue me."              Adam Sjøgren
 "Live and don't learn, that's us."                       asjo@koldfront.dk

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[Fredrik Staxeng]

Galen Boyer <galenboyer@hotpop.com> writes:

> Yes, it would be a more complicated beast, but if Gnus were to adopt
> an ability to break apart the messages and store them in a
> "well-designed" database, lots of nifty searching and archival features
> might be easier to implement (in the long run anyways)

I don't think that using a relational database _ever_ buys you easier
implementation. Sure, it gives you concurrent access at the record-level,
and the indexing you need to handle searches in really large data
volumes.

I think it would help if you described some of the lots of nifty features
instead of handwaving. I know 'select * ..' and grep well enough, and
I most certainly prefer to do much searches with grep since it's matching
is looser. A bit of extra junk is better than not finding what I am looking
for.

For example, this command serches for trace in all mails to Mikael:
        grep trace `grep -l 'To: Mikael' *`

-- 
Fredrik Stax\"ang | rot13: sfgk@hcqngr.hh.fr

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[Oliver Jennrich]

* Jarl Friis writes:

> spamtrap@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:
>> On 30 Sep 2002 20:57:41 +0200, Jarl Friis wrote:
>> 
>> > By entering my own addres I figured out that many design-decisions
>> > was made under the assumption that we all live in USA. It makes it
>> > more or less useless to me, is that really so?
>> 
>> It isn't useless to me, although I mostly use it as a glorified
>> email-database.
>> 
>> Example:
>> 
>> David Pisinger - DIKU
>> Phone: 35 32 13 54
>> Work: Datalogisk Institut
>> Universitetsparken 1
>> DK-2100 Copenhagen
>> Denmark
>> net: pisinger@diku.dk
>> 
>> Doesn't look USA-centric to me.

> It does to me.

> In Denmark we don't (necessarily) separate phonenumbers, that is,
> 35321354 should be accepted as a phonumber as well.  It is custom to
> use native city names, that is "København" instead of "Copenhagen",
> because when the post arrives to the people who care about the city
> name, it is in the correct, and the people who sort on city names may
> not speak english. On a letter to a person in Munich, Germany you
> don't write "Munich, Germany", you write "München, Germany".

Very true. Does anyone know how to enable the 'iso-accents-mode' in
bbdb-create? 

-- 
Space - the final frontier

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[Jarl Friis]

spamtrap@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

> On 01 Oct 2002 08:18:58 +0200, Jarl Friis wrote:
> 
> >>  David Pisinger - DIKU
> >>            Phone: 35 32 13 54
> >>             Work: Datalogisk Institut
> >>                   Universitetsparken 1
> >>                   DK-2100 Copenhagen
> >>                   Denmark
> >>              net: pisinger@diku.dk
> 
> >> Doesn't look USA-centric to me.
> 
> > It does to me.
> 
> Please explain what part of Mr. Pisingers address that looks
> USA-centric to you.

I did already.

> 
> bbdb reproduces it, and the phonenumber, exactly as I entered it, from
> his webpage.

Obviously, Mr. Pisinger does not know how Danish addresses are supposed
to be written. Because his website is in english, my guess is that he
think it should be that way (maybe because he uses BBDB and have been
confused by that).

If we are going into the technicalities of how danish addresses are to
be written then "just because some websites uses this format" is not a
valuable argument.

If we take a more official home page; The home page of the danish
postal distribution company (Post Danmark), they represent their
address as I described it earlier (even on their english webpage).

To complete this discussion there is only one thing to do: contact
Post Danmark and ask them to come up with a concise recipe of
how danish addresses are supposed to be written.

> 
> > Even using (setq bbdb-north-american-phone-numbers-p nil), I have
> > not been able to enter any valid danish addresses yet with
> > bbdb-create, but that may just as well be because I try on
> > xemacs-beta.
> 
> Probably, I have no problems with Danish chars. I'm using:
> 
>  XEmacs 21.4 (patch 8) "Honest Recruiter" [Lucid] (i386-debian-linux,
>   Mule) of Tue Aug  6 2002 on eeyore
> 
>  BBDB version 2.35 ($Date: 2002/08/14 19:00:58 $)
> 
>  Oort Gnus v0.07

I will eventually try with these versions and come up with another
opinion.

Jarl

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[Michael Piotrowski]

spamtrap@koldfront.dk (Adam Sjøgren) writes:

> (I haven't ever entered a numbers-only zip before, because the
> recommended notation for zip-codes as far as I know is CC-ZIP, where
> CC is the two-letter country code and ZIP is country-specific - so
> I've never seen the swapping before).

No longer.  Prefixing the ZIP code with a country code (according to
UN conventions on road traffic) was a convention only among 24
countries (most of them European).  This convention was recently
abandoned, and it is now recommended to write the destination country
in uppercase letters below the address.

Here is a complete overview of official addressing formats:
<http://www.upu.int/post_code/en/addressing_formats.html>

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                                  <mxp@dynalabs.de>

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[Fredrik Staxeng]

Galen Boyer <galenboyer@hotpop.com> writes:

I have deleted most of your arguments, to get at the crux of the matter.

> a dbms backend, merging would be much simpler and I know I could write
                                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> alot of what would be needed for the community to merge there
> out-of-sync bbdbs.

I.e. there are lots of people that already know that way, but less
people who have the knowledge to do it in the current way.

This is not an unimportant argument, far from it. In the big picture
things like this have a major effect on the success of a system.

But in a specific case like this it boils down to

a) Somebody who is comfortable with elisp could write this for you.
But then money would have pass the in other direction.

b) You could get comfortable enough in elisp to do it yourself. But 
then you would find it easier to do the merging functionality in 
elisp! (I bet you a bottle of twelve year old on this)

Anyway, I find elisp hackery a good thing to know. 

-- 
Fredrik Stax\"ang | rot13: sfgk@hcqngr.hh.fr

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[David Masterson]

>>>>> ruhl@4dv net (Robert Uhl writes:

> Here's a BBDB & gnus question for y'all to take a shot at.  I'd like
> to file things based on the BBDB mail-alias, e.g. anything from
> someone marked friend goes into mail.friends, anything from someone
> marked family goes into mail.family.  Additionally, it'd be great if
> I could somehow get at the bbdb mail-alias from the to-address group
> parameter, so that I could create an article within e.g. mail.family
> and have a new mail with family already expanded.

> Is any of this possible?  Thanks much.

Try looking at here:

        http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SplitMailUsingBbdb

-- 
David Masterson                David DOT Masterson AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA

Re: Is BBDB really that bad?

[Galen Boyer]

On 3 Oct 2002, cbbrowne@acm.org wrote:

> we'd still need to write a tool (that doesn't exist) to apply
> some quasi-intelligence to the task of merging them.

This was one of the reasons I thought an RDBMS had some merit.
Its easy to maintain a history of elements within a database and
a history of two different BBDB's is what one would probably need
to do a "more correct" merge.

-- 
Galen Boyer