Re: Address book questions

[manu <eallaud yahoo fr>]

Le 31.12.2003 19:17:14, W. Michael Petullo a écrit :
> >> It's something where I think the GNOME project is heading into the
> >> woods. I think rather than setting a defacto PIM application (evo)
> >> they should concentrate more on interfaces and formats.
> 
> > with gnome-2.6 there'll be evolution-data-server available. And it
> > shouldn't be that hard to make balsa using it. It's on my todo-list
> for
> > next year, unless evolution-2.0 makes me switching the mail-client.
> 
> I agree with Simon's points.  There is a lot of effort going into
> "big,"
> "modern" applications, perhaps at the cost of GNOME/Linux's
> traditional
> ability to revive old hardware.  But the solution, I think, is to
> simply
> continue to maintain alternative, small applications like balsa.
> And pehaps lobby that some advanced fuctionality provided by the
> bigger
> applications be broken off into smaller modules.
> 
> Back to the address book issue.  I have now tried rubrica (thanks for
> the
> suggestion).  Version 1.1.50 still feels a little developmental in
> nature.
> Specifically, I can not drag an email address and drop it into balsa
> and I can't seem to get rubrica to open an addressbook when executed.
> Despite this (and the occasional crash), rubrica does seem to be more
> maintained that gnome-pim is these days.
> 
> So, I propose that the balsa folks work with the rubrica guy to get
> balsa and rubrica working well.  I know I will certainly be  
> contacting
> rubrica's author.  As I mentioned before, balsa is a good  
> application.
> However, gnomecard, its simple address book, is unmaintained and this
> represents an eventual show stopper.  I think rubrica may give us
> some hope (unless someone steps up to maintain gnome-pim).
>

I would suggest the following : balsa should have a simple and basic  
support of a rudimentary address book (vcard as it is now) so that  
people can have balsa working for current use (read basic) without  
other dependancy and this would be lightweight. At the other end we  
have LDAP support (is this true and mature?) that allows people with  
this need to have a lightweight solution also. In between (certainly  
most "desktop" people in some sense) will need more than the  
rudimentary vcard support and certainly LDAP will be overkill for them.  
This means that we'd need to interact with a small but complete address  
book. I am not sure that the solution of exporting from the address  
book to a vcard file that balsa could use is really smart as we loose  
"interactivity" in the sense that then you have to resynchronize with  
the original address book. I would prefer a client/server approach  
(actually I was thinking of using bonobo to do that, did I hear  
overkill ? ;-) We could even write a generic bonobo component that  
could have plug-ins for any format.
Comments?
Bye
Manu

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