Distribution lists

[David Faure]

Replying to an old mail, since the discussion wasn't finished, and I'm working on
personal distribution lists now.

On Wednesday 22 September 2004 16:10, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 September 2004 16:01, Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:
> > On Wednesday,  22. September 2004 15:41, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > > It depends on what we want those distributions lists for.
> > > A distribution list based on email addresses is simpler to handle,
> > > but one which is tired to a contact also has advantages.
> >
> > I don't think that lists based on email addresses are simpler to handle. In
> > particular, if you change the  email address of a contact, you'll have to
> > check all distributions lists if they contained the old email address, and
> > in that case update them to the new email address. With uid-based lists,
> > you get that automatically.
> 
> Well if you have ten different contact folders, how do we ensure that the uids
> are unique? 

There was a discussion on kdepim about unicity of uids, and it was determined that
the likelyhood of generating the same uid for two completely different contacts
is VERY VERY small. If it ever happens, the user will get a conflict dialog even
before anything bad can happen with distribution lists, anyway. I don't think
we have to care for the 0.000001% likelihood, which would create other problems anyway.

> If as another person you can only read five out of those contact 
> folders, what do you make out of the other uids that you cannot resolve?

Well, then you can't use them. Same thing when deleting a contact.
And as long as you don't edit the distr list, those uids are not lost from it.

It seems to me that both Outlook and Kontact use a list of { UID + optionnal email },
(where the optional email is used to choose the right email in the given contact,
which is useful when it has more than one),
so how about we standardize on that in the XML format?

<distribution-list>
[...]
<!-- Distribution List specific attributes -->
<display-name>(string)</display-name>
{
  <member>
    <uid>(string)</uid>
    [<smtp-address>(string)</smtp-address>]
  </member>
}
</distribution-list>

In Kontact's case it would be even simpler to keep the same mimetype (contact),
since currently each folder contains things of only one mimetype - but I can also do 
with a separate mimetype if that's simpler for you.

-- 
David Faure -- faure at kde.org, dfaure at klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se
Qt/KDE/KOffice developer
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Platform-independent software solutions