Re: improving the Evolution addressbook conduit

[Matt Davey <mcdavey mrao cam ac uk>]

Hi Alex,

On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 05:06 -0700, Alex Lancaster wrote:
> >>>>> "MD" == Matt Davey  writes:
> 
> MD> I'm beginning to take a look at the Evolution conduits, and have
> MD> started with the addressbook conduit.
> 
> MD> I'm aiming to start by fixing some data corruption bugs that have
> MD> annoyed me for a while.  An early win is fixing the 'other' field
> MD> bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547223 There are
> MD> several other bugs that need fixing and lead to data rot.  Once
> MD> that is out of the way I'll look at adding support for ContactsDB
> MD> and the 'new' fields such as birthdays and photos.  Support for
> MD> ContactsDB will require some limited new API on the gnome-pilot
> MD> side.
> 
> Won't this require some changes on the pilot-link level to talk to
> ContactsDB?  I seem to recall from a posting by David Desrosiers some
> time back that there was some initial work done in pilot-link but that
> is currently incomplete.  

I haven't yet looked in detail at the pilot-link support.  The basics
are there, which might be sufficient.  At one stage jpilot had better
Contacts support and I'm not sure if that's all been rolled in to
pilot-link.  We'll have to check that out. Also, we'll have to decide
whether to have backwards compatibility for pilot-link versions that
don't support ContactsDB.  That would complicate the code but it's
usually worth the trouble. 

> It would be best that, where it makes sense to do so, code that is
> developed to parse ContactsDB could be pushed into pilot-link (as the
> lower level in the stack).  That way applications outside the
> gnome-pilot universe such as jpilot and the Perl bindings for
> pilot-link (I use these to sync my Treo with BBDB via syncbbdb) could
> also benefit.
> 
> Of course I'm assuming that sync via the Evolution conduits uses at
> least some of the code in pilot-link, and I haven't looked at the code
> to know how it is actually currently designed/implemented, so I'm
> probably way off base here.

Absolutely.  That is the design goal.  Internally, Evolution conduits
use the pilot-link structures and methods for unpacking and packing the
palm DB structures.

Matt

Matt Davey        If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the
mcdavey mrao cam ac uk 	poor could make a wonderful living - Yiddish Proverb