From: Karl Anderson (kra@monkey.org)
Date: Tue May 16 2000 - 20:38:03 PDT
kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker) writes:
> I want to be able to write a program to scrape my addressbook and turn
> it into another format (maybe CSCMail doesn't understand Outlook
> addressbook format).
I never understood the reason why things like addressbooks couldn't
be human-readable ascii. The reason that was good for the user, that
is.
I only use opensource mail/news agents when I have the choise, but I'm
probably not going to hack them if they break. More importantly, I
only use opendataformat, er, mail/news agents that keep their data in
simple & obvious formats, when I have the choice, so I can throw away
the reader & use a different one if I have to.
Like Napster's recent "upgrade" that locked out Metallica's list
(until they downgraded). It used a hidden registry entry, or some
rediculous thing like that, I don't really want to know. All I know
is that it was made to produce output that was difficult for the user
to fully uninstall or get around.
> The mail program already has to know how to read
> addressbook entries; that API should *definitely* be exposed to
> scripts...
>
> I don't think Unix people generally understand this, which is weird,
> because the idea more or less started on Unix.
Well, aren't the Unix people used to feeding text files to stream
editors such as perl?
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org http://www.pobox.com/~kra/
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