[Refdb-users] Re: refdb-mode problems [was: cannot add records!]

[Michael S. <sm...@xm...>]

Hi Matt,

You wrote:

[...]

> speaking of the Emacs front-end -- do you mean refdb-mode?

Yeah, I'm sure that's what Markus was referring to. I take all the blame
for it and hope you can manage to get it working so I can get more
feedback about it :-)

> I haven't for the life of me been able to get it to work, is it
> compatible with 0.9.3-pre3?

No, I don't think it's compatible, though just now I can't remember
exactly why it's not compatible and have never actually tested it with
anything but 0.9.4. Is there any way you can try using refdb-mode with
the latest 0.9.4 pre-release?

> I keep thinking I'm missing something in the 'customize' window, but
> can't figure out what it is.  whenever I try to 'getref' on my
> database, I get the error 'could not connect to database server'...

Hmm, that's bad.

Do you have a password specified in your ‾/.refdcrc file? I'm wondering
if it might be failing because refbdc is emitting an interactive prompt
for a password or something.

Anyway, there's nothing you could change in the refdb-mode customization
to fix that. All that refdb-mode does is call the refdbc command-line
utility. So if you can run refdbc from the command line without getting
errors, it seems like you should be able to get refdb-mode working.

Off the top of my head, other than the password thing, the only other
thing I can think of is maybe a username problem. refdb-mode doesn't run
refdc with the -u <username> option, and doesn't yet actually provide
any way to specify a username (because in my testing, I've never needed to).

> and I can't find any documentation on refdb-mode.

The documentation, such as it is, is in the refdb-mode.el file itself.
But I don't think there's anything there that will help you fix your
problem. There's nothing you can tune within refdb-mode that will
affecte whether or not refdbc connects to refdbd successfully.

> Do you have any advice?

Install the latest 0.9.4 release and test with that ;) Short of that, if
you can send me output of your Emacs *Messages* buffer, that'll show me
what Emacs is trying to do at the point where it fails.

Also, if I knew what OS you're running your Emacs on and what Emacs
version you're running, that might help. I've personally tested it only
on Debian Linux and Cygwin, so there might be some platform-related
problems that nobody else has run into so far.

Anyway, I hope and can manage to help you get it working.

  --Mike