Wanted: A contact manager/address book with a sense of time

Question

There is one feature which I didn't find in any contact management application out there, and which keeps me using paper-based solutions: A way to see how old old any specific piece of information is. Use case: „This phone number of X I wrote down/saved here, is it the most recent one, or am I risking calling the next tenant of the flat (who I really don't want to talk to for some reason)? When did I make this phone number entry?“
I believe I have looked at almost any contact manager available in the Arch repos and the AUR, but I may still have missed one. If any of you know of a contact app with a sense of time, please speak up.
Otherwise, maybe some of the developers among you also find that this feature would be nice to have, and feel inspired to code something. That would be great!
If I had any say in the details, the data backend would be something easily accessible by other programs (text files, maybe vcard), it would integrate nicely with email clients for adding and completing addresses, and it would have a simple UI (don't care if graphical, console or pure CLI, as long as it works). For reference, I quite liked "contacts" from the Pimlico project, which doesn't seem to be developed anymore (project website is down). Also, osmo looks nice, although it is doing too many different things for my taste (contacts, calendar, tasks, notes).
One way to implement this would obviously be to combine and integrate any app which saves its data in text files with a version control system like git. However, that might be overkill.

Answer 1

progandy wrote:
Franek wrote:[…]what would be the advantage of this? Read/write performance would probably be better with sqlite, but I don't believe I know enough people for this ever to be noticable.
You don't have to implement as much search logic, only a search mask and a result list.
True.
skanky wrote:Maybe the triggered script could then run "git blame" and insert the information into a custom field in the contact data file
I wouldn't store the time info redundantly in the contacts file when it is already stored in the git repo. The frontend program can just call "git blame" at runtime to get the time info to be displayed.  Redundancy could lead to corrupt (contradictory) time data if something goes wrong in the saving process, and at worst, it might create an infinite loop (when the file is changed, "git blame" is called and the time info inserted into the file, which is thus changed, which triggers "git blame" being called again…)
drcouzelis wrote:
I'm kind of sad that the best / easiest / simplest solution so far sounds like just keeping a digital version of the original paper-based solution, AKA a plain text file. :/ Benefits over paper include being able to do a search and never having to wonder if that scribble was a "5" or a "6". :P
Well, I'm not that sad I guess. I do love plain text. It never goes out of style! :D
While I share to your sadness and your love for plain text, bare text files seem to lack certain features that I would consider crucial: MUA integration and easy grouping/tagging (or similar) of contacts. Both could of course be implemented as simple shell utilities operating on text files, and the result might be a really awesome contact managing solution…