Re: Contact data and sync revisited

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com> writes:

> I've been trying to find the best way to manage my contacts. I've dabbled with
> org-contact and using an Org file with property drawers, I've dabbled with
> BBDB. I've looked at standalone programs.
>
> My key problem is I need a way to access my contacts in Emacs and Mutt, and 
> send
> them to my Android phone. Single direction sync is fine.
>
> Using a Nextcloud host, org-caldav, and DAVx5 I have already successfully 
> pushed my
> calendar events to my Android phone. This makes it even more important for me 
> to
> solve this issue finally.
>
> I've considered the merit of a few options:
>
>  - Use Org-contacts
>    - Pro: It's in org! So easy, lets me keep notes and appointment data 
> easily.
>    - Cons: Doesn't export at all.
>
>  - BBDB
>    - Pro: It's in Emacs natively, with Org integration.
>    - Pro: Larger users base than Org-contacts, more software
>    - Cons: Exports but requires additional tools to sync
>
> Unfortunately looking at the options keeps coming back to how poor general
> support for CardDAV and vcard files is. In particular, the popular vdirsyncer
> tool is now looking for a new maintainer, and I had the impression from his 
> list
> of grievances he might drop it entirely.

This is not yet a working solution, but I'm gradually getting there with
EBDB, a port/rewrite of BBDB. It does vCard export, though not very well
yet. I've also written a library called "vcard", which does parsing of
vcards into Elisp data, but have yet to get off my butt and wire
everything together. The end result will be an EBDB database that uses
the vCard format natively for storage.

Then I was planning on relying on vdirsyncer for CardDAV syncing, and
it's a bummer to hear that it might go unmaintained. I could write a
native CardDAV client using dav.el, but seeing how much fun David
Engster has maintaining org-caldav, I'm not eager to go that route.

If you're interested, you can follow this issue.

https://github.com/girzel/ebdb/issues/4

Yes, it's issue #4, opened in 2016. Don't let that discourage you!

Eric