On Fri Apr 22 2011 Leo wrote: > As stated in the subject line. Good catch!
The "degree" field is possibly not named in the best way. For me, the motivation has been in academics (which is a significant part of my bbdb database). Yet I could envision other uses, too. > I still find the firstname + lastname + degree not able to cover some > use cases. For example: Professor Sir (Robert) Brian Heap CBE FRS. > > vCard has N type that has: > > surname, given name, additional, prefix, suffix > > which is more accommodating. I don't know whether it's worth the effort to break this down in such a fairly complicated way. I guess it's fair to say that most names *can* be broken down into first and last name. When I travel around the world, these are the fields I need to fill out on the forms when entering a country. So whatever someone's name is, he or she knows how to break it down to squeeze it into two such fields. >From a rather different perspective, I can say here that I am also maintaining bibtex-mode for GNU Emacs (how am I ending up with all this database modes for Emacs???). BibTeX likewise assumes that names are essentially made out of essentially two pieces, first and last names, though it offers a fair amount of flexiblity to squeeze prefixes and suffixes into its scheme based on first and last names. In that sense, I'd guess it would get rather complicated and probably not worth the effort to have lots of additional fields associated with the name of a person. A rather different question is more related to the BBDB internals. In BDBB, names are entered into a hash table that is used for things like completion (which, by the way, would also become much more complicated if the name consisted of more than two fields). The idea of the degree field has been that it is outside these name-related mechanisms of BBDB. You could say: this is just what note fields are for. Yes, that's right. But then my thinking has been that note fields are normally displayed at the end of each record, which is rather "far away". So I thought it would be good to have one field displayed closer to the name. A more generic name for this field would probably be better. "Name-additional" sounds rather clumsy, but it is kind of what it could be. All these thought are not 100% mature and final. Suggestions welcome! From a different perspective, I want to add that if someone doesn't care about this field, he or she can completely ignore it and should never notice that it is available. Roland ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fulfilling the Lean Software Promise Lean software platforms are now widely adopted and the benefits have been demonstrated beyond question. Learn why your peers are replacing JEE containers with lightweight application servers - and what you can gain from the move. http://p.sf.net/sfu/vmware-sfemails _______________________________________________ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
