The Insidious Big Brother Database

Quicklinks: get the bbdb | mailing lists | links | manual | project home

What is The Insidious Big Brother Database?

The Insidious Big Brother Database (BBDB) is a contact management utility created by Jamie Zawinski for use with Emacs. It is tightly integrated with several mail and news readers (see below), allowing it to create database entries directly from mail and news messages. As is usual with applications for Emacs, this record creation can be configured in many ways, ranging from a boolean create/don't create setting to creation based on the result of a user-supplied function.

Database records can be used to store many types of information, from name and address to URLs and X-Face images. This information can be displayed when a message from an entity named in a database record is recieved. In addition, messages from database members can be tagged in the Gnus Summary Buffer, and Gnus scoring can be configured based on the contents of database records. Supercite citations can even be preset through the use of records in the BBDB.

Requirements:

Supported versions of Emacs

Gnu Emacs

versions 19.34 and above

XEmacs

versions 19.16 and above

Supported Mail and News readers

The BBDB can be used without a mail- or news-reader. It has, however, been optimized for use with one.

• Gnus
• VM
• MH-e
• Rmail
• UNIX Netscape Mail (via bbdb-srv)
• UNIX Netscape News (via bbdb-srv)

Getting the BBDB

BBDB 2.00.06 is the current released version. It fixes a number of things that emacs 20.x breaks in BBDB 2.00, such as key mappings.

Current development version: 2.2

This is as-yet untagged; the change in minor revision number reflects the following caveat:

WARNING: this modifies the BBDB file format. Anything which relies on BBDB's current file format will no longer work. Alex has also written a function to revert the file format to the 2.00.06 variant - see the links section below. I've modified it to handle the further hack I've inflicted on the streets field.

This is now in CVS at the head of the tree; you can grab the tarball. This is updated from CVS at midnight Pacific Time on the SourceForge site.

Compilation notes:

1. Compilation is known to work with Solaris make and with GNU make. If you discover compilation problems with other versions of make, please submit a bug report to bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net. The make binary shipped with IRIX 6.2 is known not to work with BBDB version 2.00. Also, some of the test targets don't work with GNU make, since MAKEFLAGS doesn't include "-".
   
   Didier Verna is currently working on autoconf support, so that the above problem should go away.
2. Texinfo 3.11 (or later) is required to compile the texinfo documentation. It is available at the GNU FTP site. Precompiled info files are included in the tarball.

CVS tree

The development and release versions are available via Anon-CVS to the CVS tree at cvs.bbdb.sourceforge.net. To access the tree, log in with the following command:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.bbdb.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bbdb login

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.bbdb.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bbdb checkout bbdb
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.bbdb.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/bbdb checkout -r rev bbdb

The first command will check out a copy of the latest version. Usually this latest version will be a development version, but it may fetch a release version if the command is executed soon enough after a release version is made available.

The second command allows control of the version retrieved, through the -r rev argument. The rev portion of the argument should be replaced with a word of the form:

x and yy are components of the version to be retrieved, as in x.yy. Note: unoff should be appended to the above word for all versions prior to 2.00.

-r BBDB_1_90unoff

-r BBDB_2_00_06

Manual

This is a HTML version of the texinfo manual that accompanies BBDB generated by texi2html.

Mailing Lists

There are two mailing lists for the BBDB:

bbdb-info

General discussion about the BBDB, both for users and developers. Some of it was archived at Xemacs.org, but was very old (June 1996) and I've asked them to remove it - it'll reappear here soon for posterity. The archive for mails up to end of April 2000 can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com/bbdb-info%40xemacs.org/. Since April 2000 mails are archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/bbdb-info%40lists.sourceforge.net/.

SourceForge has built-in archiving which didn't initially seem to be working, but is apparently okay now.

bbdb-announce

Announcements of new BBDB versions. This list is moderated, and has very low volume.

Links

Several people have been hacking at BBDB and have pages describing what they're at. Please check which version of BBDB they apply to before attempting to use them!

• Alex Schroeder has done some work on address formats and pine/mailrc integration. He's also responsible for making BBDB handle non-US addresses a lot better.
• Jochen Küpper has done some work on bbdb-print, which is now in CVS.
• Thomas DeWeese has a PilotManager plugin called SyncBBDB.
• Noah Friedman is currently maintaining jwz's bbdb-pilot.el.
• Martin Schwenke has written some code to export BBDB records to a Nokia phone via gnokii. You can find it at his web site.
• Aldo Valente has done some work on making SyncAB (from PilotManager) work with BBDB.
• Chris Beggy has managed to get BBDB working with Mew, a mailreader with Japanese language support. There's a bbdb-mew.el on this page which should probably make it into the official tree at some point.
• The bits subdirectory in the source tree contains random bits and pieces that I've collected but not integrated, including a generic export filter of sorts and PGP and Outlook integration/interaction.

Hosted by

Mirrored at
waider.ie