What Itch does this Scratch?

Do you have a bunch of different name and address files lying around
in a bunch of different formats?  I did --  and then I discovered BBDB
- The Insidious Big Brother DataBase system than runs with (X)EMACS.
Now I never lose an email address anymore, and I decided to wanted to
merge all my old name and address files into one central database.
Only PERL would do for the conversion process, and I needed to be able
to read and write my existing BBDB file, hence this module.

If you want to use PERL rather than LISP to access or modify your BBDB
file this module could save you a lot of work.

How do I install it?

To install this module, cd to the directory that contains this README
file and type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

If for some reason this doesn't work, the only file that is really
needed is BBDB.pm.  Try:

   cp BBDB.pm /usr/local/lib/perl5

or where ever you want to put it.

What system does this run on?

I've only tested it under Linux, but I see no reasons why it wouldn't
work on any other systems.

What about the documentation?

There is POD documentation in the BBDB.pm file.  There are also some
examples in the example.pl script, which do some useful things and
demonstrate the functionality of the module.  

I hope this module is useful to you all, and thank you PERL and Linux
for making my computing dreams come true.

Henry Laxen
nadine.and.henry@pobox.com
http://www.maztravel.com/

========================================================================

Many thanks to Colin J. Wynne for finding and fixing bugs in my
original 1.10 version.  His changes are included in the 1.20 version.

Many thanks to Jack Twilley for finding and fixing some bugs in the
encoding and decoding of phone numbers and countries.  His changes
are included in the 1.34 version.

Thanks to Christoph von Nathusius for finding and fixing a problem
with umlauts, and in fact all characters above 127 decimal.  His changes
are reflected in the 1.35 version.
