Subject: Re: bug#56475: 28.1.50; bibtex-parse-entry disregards @string substitutions

From: Roland Winkler <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2022 15:10:39 -0500

On Sun, Jul 17 2022, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
>>> Also, note that bibtex-string-files cannot help with situations when
>>> the BibTeX buffer does not have an associated file.
>>
>> When does this happen?  To the best of my knowledge, this has never been
>> an issue for users of bibtex.el.
>
> It is more of a hypothetical scenario that might occur in future if Org
> tries to support bibliographies provided inside .org files. Such
> bibliographies will need to be converted to .bib files transiently and
> might not need to be saved on disk.

This sounds to me like reinventing the wheel and a poor design choice.
BibTeX is a well-established bibliography format with a large ecosystem
[(La)TeX].  Also, publishers provide BibTeX records for their journal
articles.  (Occassionally I need to deal with records that have some
other database format like RIS.  Converting formats is always painful.)

>From a practical perspective, BibTeX mode is built around the idea that
users may have a large bibliography database.  Something like 10,000
records is not exotic.  Then it is natural to split up these entries
among multiple files.  BibTeX mode and its API support this very nicely.
(I have many little helper functions in my emacs init file that use the
BibTeX mode API.  Maybe I should put some of these also into bibtex.el.)

What are the usage scenarios you have in mind for putting a bibliography
database into org mode that comes with its own database format?