Re: Proposed patch to phonebook.py

On Sep 23, 2005, at 5:54 PM, Andrew Zitnay wrote:

> update the BitPim database with the contents of the phone, the speed 
> dial wouldn't get removed from the BitPim database. 

That is intentional.  The phones store a crippled limited subset of 
information.  It was a deliberate choice to consider the existing 
information in the BitPim database to be more authoritative than what 
is coming off the phone.

This is definitely the right thing to do most of the time.  For example 
if the phone says someone's name is 'Long John Smi' and the database 
says it is 'Long John Smith' then the database is right.  Similarly the 
phones have more limits on how many numbers, emails, urls etc they can 
store and the length of them.

In the case of the speed dial we are unable to tell the difference 
between the user intentionally not having a speed dial for an entry 
(despite having one in the database) or because they haven't done them 
on the phone and the entries should have a speed dial as the database 
indicates.

The only solution to this is true synchronization.  With true 
synchronization you store what you sent the device last time and what 
it has now.  Any changes indicate a deliberate edit by the user.  You 
have to take into account how information gets mangled when you send it 
(truncated or limited in other ways) and also timestamp when the 
changes were likely made by the user since they can have multiple 
devices and do synchronization and changes in any order order.

The current BitPim sync is the right thing (tm) for the very first sync 
when you have no history.

Roger



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