From: Roland W. <wi...@gn...> - 2010-11-02 16:17:44
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Hi Uwe I am sorry for the delayed reply. > First of all I did not mean to attack you, sorry if I have > caused that impression. No problem, any feedback is appreciated! > > From bbdb home page it appears the code did not evolve > > for a long time (Jan 2007). > > That is correct. (Same was true for VM) > > > I think Roland wrote bbbd 3.0 with the idea to remove > > some crufts, enhance the clarity of the code > > (function's description, etc.) > > So far so good, I appreciate that effort > > > and use more meaningful names. > > This, in my opinion, is a very bad idea. > Taste is subjective and once names are chosen they become a > convention. To break backward compatibility deliberately has > no benefit I can think off. I believe that these things cannot be seen independently. I believe that a main reason why BBDB did not evolve anymore for quite some time was related to the fact that its code had reached a stage that made it very difficult for anyone to make any changes to it. Initially, when I started with this project, I tried to keep the code more backward compatible. Yet at some point, I realized that I would not get anywhere with my attempts, unless I took more drastic steps, i.e., the internals of BBDB have changed significantly. > Well in that case defalias should be used for backward > compatibility. When my updates of BBDB were in a pre-alpha stage and I did not yet have a detailed roadmap where they would take me, I thought that there was really not much of a point trying to continuously (at each intermediate stage) preserve backward compatibility when it would have been possible. Now that the new code has reached a more mature stage, it could make sense to look over it once more for things like defaliases. (Yet this might require checking things more carefully, as I also tried to make the behavior of BBDB more consistent both with respect to differents parts of BBDB as well as compared with other packages of emacs.) Again, volunteers welcome! Cheers, Roland |