swab: The System Wide Address Book for Linux

swab.kennypearce.net

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I've given up on writing swab-LDAP myself. It should be possible to implement it as an openldap backend, but I can't understand the openldap code. It's a large and complex program, and there is little or no documentation. Instead, I've been working on a swab-mozilla package. I'm a little stuck at the moment on a line in my address book file that I can't make sense of with the limited (and probably outdated) documentation on the file format that I found, but I'm confident that I can get around this (I don't think the line is important - I may just ignore it). Next on my list is evolution, because since the time I began working on swab-mozilla I've switched from mozilla to galeon and evolution.

From the General README File Version 0.1-0

	The purpose of the swab project is to create an address book for Linux
which is standard system-wide. Initially, this will be accomplished by various
front-ends allowing swab to communicate with different applications. These are
named with the convention swab-<application>. The only front-end currently in
existence is swab-shell, which provides a minimal command-line interface to
swab. The main purpose of swab-shell is to test libswab functions, and it has
very limited practical usefulness. The next to be written will be swab-ldap, 
which will interface to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which will allow
swab to communicate with evolution, mozilla, netscape, pine, mutt, and probably 
many others. As a happy side effect, it will also allow swab to be accessed 
remotely, if the user desires.
	On the back-end is libswab. The hope is that eventually programs
needing to communicate with swab will be written to use libswab for address
book support. Of course, this will not happen until swab use becomes 
widespread, which will not happen until all of the popular applications are
supported, and this situation necessitates the ldap front-end and the mangling
of data files belonging to other programs. Non-ldap compatible programs for
which support is planned so far include kmail, GnomeCard and kaddressbook. 
Support for pilot-link has already been requested, but the author does not have
access to a palm-pilot, so this front-end will have to be written by someone
else. If you REALLY want to use swab with pilot-link and REALLY don't want to
write the front-end yourself, feel free to donate a palm-pilot to the cause, and
I'll get to work on it ASAP :).