bibtex-1.0, or maybe not

[Norman Gray]

Karl, hello.

On 23 May 2024, at 23:39, Karl Berry wrote:

>     A url={} field would contain... a URL
>
> You might think so. But no. Sometimes url= looks like
>   url="\url{...}"
> or
>   url="\href{...}{...}"
> or
>   url="who knows what people come up with"

Really? -- cor!  I think I would file those under 'defective design taste', but if there's a non-negligible number of those (and you'll probably have seen a broader range of .bib files than I have) then your compatibility point is well-made.

I have in the past wondered about proposing some sort of consensus registry of .bib conventions, to head off this sort of issue.  But I've never been sufficiently sure what form that registry would take, nor where it would be discussed, to actually propose setting it up in fact.

> I think the 1.0 version number is the bigger fetish :).
> When a program has been 0.99x for decades, well, it's 1.0 in reality.
> Seems pointless to pretend otherwise.
>
>     One could imagine distributions including a `bibtex` program at v1.0
>     alongside a bibtex99 program scrupulously unchanged from v0.99d, for
>     those occasions where a precisely reproducible workflow is desirable.
>
> It's imaginable, but in reality we don't do that in TL (or MiKTeX as far
> as I know). Distributions aren't the place to do version control, IMHO.

There's potentially an interesting conversation to be had, about the boundaries of backward-compatibility, and where user-change might be reasonably expected.  But that conversation might be more interesting than immediately productive (and might not really work without $beverage in hand).

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk