Re: [Evolution-hackers] Gender ...

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 12:11 +0000, michael meeks wrote:
> So,
> 
> 	At the risk of offending the gender-confused; it would be -extremely-
> useful to have a Gender boolean in the evolution addresbook [ of course,
> perhaps there is & I'm just missing it but I dug into the code ].

It may be useful to have a gender field in the contacts, though I can't
think of a good reason at the moment;  I don't think that field is
derivable from anything else that currently exists.

> 
> 	The reason is OO.o will vary it's salutation on gender; ie.
> 
> 	Dear Mrs. Foo
> 	Dear Mr. Foo

Err... isn't the "title" field what you really need?  This varies much
more than purely with gender, to the point that the OO.org feature
sounds useless in the locales I'm personally familiar with: most
unmarried women in the UK and US I know would be offended to receive a
"Dear Mrs. Foo".  I also know a female "Dr" who has fought a multiyear
battle with her bank to get her title correct in their correspondence.

> 
> 	etc. - now one can argue whether this is broken etc. but there it
> is ;-) the current ergonomics are rather built around this - and, you
> can see that such a boolean internationalizes rather nicely.

It's broken, and certainly doesn't localize to the UK and US, to my
knowledge.


> 
> 	So - the question is: can we have it ? currently the OO.o mail merge is
> rather feeble without it.

Sounds like OO.o's mail merge is broken :-)

Dave