Re: Upstreaming parsebib.el

[Joost Kremers]

Hi Roland, 

apologies for the late reply.

On Thu, Jan 16 2025, Roland Winkler wrote:
> I haven't looked into parsebib in detail.  But as the maintainer of
> bibtex.el I see no problem.  The goal of bibtex.el is to facilitate
> editing bib files.  From what you say, my understanding of parsebib is
> to use bib files as a database (beyond what LaTeX can do in combination
> with the actual BibTeX program / biblatex).

Yes, that sums it up pretty well.

> Could it be that reftex.el (in GNU Emacs core) might benefit from
> parsebib?  I do not know the internals of reftex.el either.  But I know
> that reftex.el comes with its own parser for BibTeX files.  So parsebib
> may help to avoid redundancies.

I hadn't thought about reftex.el yet, but yeah, that sounds like it's worth
checking out.

>> One question that would arise is obviously compatibility with `bibtex.el`.
>> `parsebib` tends to favour biblatex over BibTeX, which IIUC, is not the
>> case for `bibtex.el` (CC: Roland Winkler).
>
> What does "favour" mean from the perspective of parsebib?  To the best
> of my knowledge, the file format supported by biblatex is identical to
> the format used by old-fashioned BibTeX.  The only differences are that
> biblatex supports a wider range of BibTeX entry types and biblatex
> provides more options for generating bibliographies in LaTeX documents.
> But for a parser of bib files the way you describe it, this should not
> make a significant difference.

Hmm, it seems I was mistaken here. I was thinking about cases like the
issue discussed here:

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=69266

which is specifically about this entry:

```
@InCollection{Geyer2011,
  title           = {Introduction to Markov Chain Monte  \} Carlo},
  pages           = 45,
}
```

BibTeX chokes on this, and I thought for some reason that biblatex doesn't.
But trying it out now, it turns out that biber reports an error as well, so
it's not actually a difference between the two.



-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments