bug#10254: 24.0.92; Local variable bibtex-dialect has no effect

[Uwe Siart <uwe.siart@tum.de>]

"Roland Winkler" <winkler@gnu.org> writes:

> Do you want to use buffer-local values of bibtex-dialect because you
> do have multiple BibTeX files, some of which use one BibTeX dialect,
> others use another dialect?

Exactly, yes.

> Such a scenario is somewhat orthogonal to the general notion of BibTeX
> that should provide one database that is used for all LaTeX documents.

Surely I use centrally managed bibfiles. They reside in
~/texmf/bibtex/bib/siart. Since I do not like one huge monolithic
bibfile my database is split across several files where each file is
dedicated to a certain topic. But with a bibfile local to a certain
document BibTeX is also much superior to filling {thebibliography} by
hand.

But this is not the point here. The point is that classical bibstyles
and biblatex are not compatible at bibfile level. A bibfile can only be
used either for bibstyles or for biblatex. In my case mostly due to the
different handling of the month and language fields.

It is IMO not a rare case that one has to use both biblatex and
bibstyles. If I need to implement a certain requirement for the
bibliography that can only be solved by biblatex (e.g. a particular
sorting scheme) I will need to create a bibfile for biblatex. On the
other hand I can not simply throw away all the achivements of classical
bibstyle. Moreover, if a publisher provides a template bibstyle I have
to use it. No way to convince a publisher to switch his workflow to
biblatex immediately.

So I am in a situation where I have to manage both bibtex dialects at
the same time in different files. I don't think that this is really
against the BibTeX paradigm. It's just that we now have both options
(bibstyle and biblatex) and they are not compatible.

> Also, I do not consider this a bug. In my opinion, it's more a missing
> feature.

I got your point and I fully agree. I never meant to decide whether it
is a bug or not. At the time when I filed a bug report I just observed
that setting a buffer-local variable had no effect while click in the
menue worked. This looked like a bug to me at that time.

-- 
Uwe