Re: [Patch] [Part 0/3] Support for Osmo address book

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

Hi Albrecht!

On 11/09/2016 02:40:33 PM Wed, Albrecht Dreß wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> this patch series introduces read-only support for the Osmo address book.
>
> I was looking for a while for a good address book application, as the options implemented in Balsa are 
> somewhat limited:
> - balsa's own address book (whatever storage backend it uses) is fine for mail addresses, but limited 
> otherwise
> - LDAP IMHO is a nice option for corporate networks only
> - Gnomecard is dead since ages
> - Rubrica is also dead and does not compile any more on recent systems (like Ubuntu)
>
> A really good, and still maintained, alternative is Osmo [1] which, despite its low version number, looks really nice 
> and provides almost all I need.  After some discussion [2] with one of the developers we came to the conclusion that 
> directly accessing Osmo's backend store files (xml) is not a good idea.  A good solution seems to be a DBus interface 
> to which Balsa (or any other application) can send a search request, and Osmo replies with a standard RFC 6350 (VCard 
> 4.0) "file" through DBus.
>
> The current SVN version of Osmo (rev. 1099) supports read-only access to the contacts via DBus.  Later 
> extensions could be write access (i.e. store or modify an item in Osmo), or even sending iCalendar (RFC 5545) 
> items, e.g. from message attachments in Balsa, to Osmo.
>
> I noticed that Balsa's VCard parser is not RFC 6350 compliant - inter alia, it does not support folding (RFC 
> 6350, sect. 3.2) and escaping (RFC 6350, sect. 3.4), so I wrote a /very/ simple new one, reading from a 
> GDataInputStream.
>
> As the patch is rather big, I split it into three parts:
> - Osmo address book interface implementation
> - RFC 6350 parser
> - patches for auxiliary files.
>
> Please note that for the time being only read-only access to Osmo is possible.  I also changed the address 
> pattern matching a little bit: it will list all addresses where the pattern matches /anywhere/ in any 
> LibBalsaAddress field or in the email address.
>
> As everything is really experimental, you have to add "--with-osmo" con the configure arguments as to enable 
> this patch.  Of course, Osmo must be running and accessible via DBus...
>
> As always, any feedback would be highly welcome!
>
> Cheers,
> Albrecht.

Thanks for the patches, and for the negotiations with the Osmo devs!

It all looks good: builds and runs, with or without Osmo support. Pushed to master!

Porting Osmo from legacy GtkSpell to Gspell would be nice, but relevant only because Balsa no longer depends 
on GtkSpell.

Best,

Peter