BBDB woes

[Richard Lewis <richardlewis@fastmail.co.uk>]

Hi there,

Since upgrading to Emacs 24 (from the Debian unstable packages), I'm
having real trouble with my BBDB and I'm not sure where to get
help. There are so many things going wrong that I'm not at a loss to
document them all properly. So here's a list of some of them:

 * BBDB won't parse my .bbdb file anymore; it reports type errors for
   various values in the file. In some places it expects lists and
   finds strings, and in others it expects strings and finds lists.

 * There seem to be at least two versions of BBDB around, 2.36 and
   3.02. I think I've tried installing both. And neither will parse my
   .bbdb file.

 * I tried installing BBDBv3-Wl along with BBDB 3.02.

 * BBDBv3-Wl doesn't load mime-view-mode in time, and reports
   "Symbol's value as variable is void: mime-view-mode-default-map" on
   startup. This was just to bind ":" to something, so I commented the
   whole eval-and-compile out.

I'm using el-get and these are the recipes I have at the moment:

	  (:name bbdb
	  	 :website "http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/";
	  	 :description "The Insidious Big Brother Database (BBDB) is a contact management utility."
	  	 :type git
	  	 ;;:url "https://github.com/emacsmirror/bbdb";
	  	 ;;:url "https://github.com/barak/BBDB.git";
		 :url "git://git.savannah.nongnu.org/bbdb.git"
	  	 :load-path ("./lisp")
	  	 :build `("autoconf" ("./configure" ,(concat "--with-emacs=" el-get-emacs)) ,(concat "make VMDIR= EMACS=" el-get-emacs " autoloads") ,(concat "make VMDIR= EMACS=" el-get-emacs " -C lisp bbdb"))
	  	 :features bbdb
	  	 :autoloads nil
	  	 :post-init (lambda () (bbdb-initialize)))

	  (:name bbdbv3-wl
		 :website ""
		 :description "Integrate BBDB v3 with Wanderlust"
		 :type svn
		 :url "http://svn.gna.org/svn/bbdbv3-wl/trunk";
		 :load-path ("./lisp")
		 :features bbdbV3-wl)

You can see I've tried a few different repositories for BBDB.

Apologies for not being very specific. But does anyone have any advice
on how I can regain access to my .bbdb? It's very unsettling when
Emacs starts to fall apart under me; it makes clear to me just how
much I rely on it.

Thanks,
Richard