Re: gnome-pim confusion

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2000 15:44:39 EST, Vadim Strizhevsky wrote:

>I'm cc calendar-list because this concerns changes to gnomecard and
>needs to be approved by gnome-pim maintainers. Perhaps this can even
>make it into gnome-pim 1.2?
>
>Just to update everyone, Alan is suggesting adding support of REV
>field to gnomecard, so that every time card is updated the new REV
>(current date-time) is saved. This will allow pilot conduit to know
>when the record was modified. I think this was tossed around before,
>but no one (well I didn't ;) wanted to bother implementing it at a 
time.

I'm willing to grant that not saving a property we load from disk is 
a bug, and since the fix should be relatively simple, I'll accept 
this as a bug fix, and not subject to the feature freeze.

>Note that this will not solve the deletion problem. To solve the
>deletion problem, gnomecard needs to 
>  1) upon deletion leave the record in the file but "mark" it deleted.
>     The only actual data that has to be preserved is UID, all else
>     can be removed.
>  2) ignore such deleted records on load.
>I dont know how feasable that would in regards with staying 
compatible
>wiht various RFCs and what not.

This, however, strikes me as having many more ramifications, and thus 
I would prefer not to insert this change at this point.  I'm not a 
gnomecard user, however, so if this is a significant problem with the 
current conduit/gnomecard setup, you're free to try to change my 
mind...  (That includes someone checking the relevant standards to 
see if adding the patch would break compliance.)

The bottom line, IMO, is that gnomecard is very buggy, and is 
hopefully going away in the medium-term future (when Evolution is 
released, which will have a brand-new contact manager).  I'm 
disinclined to put a lot of time into it for that reason, but if 
others want to, I'll accept patches which don't make matters worse.  
I'm not going to hold up the eventual gnome-pim release, however, 
just to wait for them.

-Russell