Re: updating, confused

[Greg Troxel]

"Roland Winkler" <address@hidden> writes:

> While an Info manual is still missing for BBDB 3, most of your
> questions are addressed in README.

Thanks very much for your patience, and to N. Jackson for the ^U : hint.
I did read README before posting, but my mental picture of how it used
to work was too strong.  I agree the new way is much more flexible and
can easily be made to do what I used to want.

Having reread README with your comments and N.'s hint, I'm straightened
out.

>> Now, in gnus, looking at a message, typing : gets me the bbdb buffer if
>> the sender already has an entry.
>> 
>> But, if there is no entry, I don't see anything.  I used to create
>> entries that way.
>
> In Gnus : is bound to bbdb-mua-display-sender.  This works without
> or with a prefix.  And what happens exactly depends on the user
> variable bbdb-mua-update-interactive-p.
>
> From what I understand, you might want to bind
> bbdb-mua-update-interactive-p to '(query . create).
>
> See README.

That's indeed what I want.

>> Typing ;, to create an entry and pull up notes (which used to work and
>> still seems to be documented to do that), doesn't do anything.
>
> ; is boumd to bbdb-mua-edit-field-sender, see its doc string.

What I didn't get was that ; without an argument did query, not create.
This is just my failure to read based on previous understanding.

>>   automatically display the record of the sender
>
> Use bbdb-mua-auto-update-init  (see README)

I also didn't absorb that by default this was off, since it being on
seemed very fundamental to the old way, and I may well have not touched
my old config for 20 years.  But letting people choose is good, and once
understood it's obviously sensible.

This diff to README is probably too much.  But it tries to avoid a clone
of me from being confused, especially the first hunk.

Greg

diff --git a/README b/README
index e830034..7102ce3 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -146,8 +146,11 @@ There are two ways for BBDB to interface with MUAs:
 Interactive commands
 --------------------
 
-Call bbdb-initialize (usually in your init file) to initialize
-the MUA interfaces based on interactive commands
+Call bbdb-initialize (usually in your init file) to initialize the MUA
+interfaces based on interactive commands.  (Note that this will not
+cause BBDB to display information (or offer to add it) just because a
+mail message is viewed.  That configuration is additional; see the
+next section.)
 
 MUA commands include
 
@@ -181,6 +184,12 @@ WITHOUT-PREFIX and WITH-PREFIX may take the values
                 It should return one of the above values (see below).
  read         Read the value interactively.
 
+When thinking about how to choose, consider that you may want
+interactive commands to be more aggresive if you automatically display
+records.  As an example, (query . create) would cause : to ask and ^U
+: to create; this fits a usage pattern where an existing record is
+displayed and you don't use : to ask to see the existing record.
+
 BBDB 2 also used MUA-specific variables bbdb/MUA-update-records-mode
 to control its interfaces with MUAs.  If you liked this feature, use
 the function bbdb-mua to define your own function to get MUA-specific