Re: [O] [RFC] Org document concept + document property drawers

[Gustav Wikström]

Hi Adam,

> This is a very interesting idea, and I don't want to dismiss your work,
> but I am concerned about how much third-party code will likely break by
> changing the results returned by org-element for parsing an Org buffer.
> I haven't thoroughly studied all of the code in your patches, so I may
> be wrong, but I think the breakage could be extensive.  For example,
> simple operations like destructuring the results of org-element parsing
> functions may be broken.  Have you done any investigation into this
> issue?
> 
> Maybe there should be a transitional period in which the existing
> org-element parsing functions would work as before, and the new
> document-level elements would be returned by a new org-element
> document-level parsing function.  Frankly, if there is breakage,the
> transition would probably take a few years, because there is a lot of
> code out there that has worked for years and may not be updated or
> replaced for years.

I have not investigated much into that to be honest. I'd argue that
it's a fairly trivial change in terms of the parser though. Everything
will work as before except when you're after the whole buffer
syntax-tree. In that case one will have to dig one step deeper into
the tree to find the content.

Previous tree: 
(org-data nil CONTENTS)

With this patch:
(org-data nil (document (doc-props) CONTENTS))

Yeah.. The structure changed a bit. But it's a fairly trivial change 
in my opinion. Everything else works as before AFAIK... But I might be 
overseeing something. Please enlighten me in that case!

I've made specification-changes only at two locations in the
test-cases for org-element. (ref. patch nr.1) 

Best
Gustav