bug#21099: 24.3; bibtex-clean-entry and date fields in biblatex

["Roland Winkler" <winkler@gnu.org>]

On Fri Aug 2 2019 Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Gustavo Barros <gusbrs.2016@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > So, with defaults, from an original entry like:
> >
> >    @Article{Author2019c,
> >      author       = {Author},
> >      title        = {Title},
> >      journaltitle = {Journal title},
> >      date         = {2019},
> >    }
> >
> > the result of `bibtex-clean-entry` is:
> >
> >    @Article{Author2019c,
> >      author       = {Author},
> >      title        = {Title},
> >      journaltitle = {Journal title},
> >      date         = 2019,
> >    }
> 
> Right; this is what the bug report claims makes latexmk and biber stop
> working, but you say later that this isn't the case?  Could there be
> versions of these programs that choke on brace-less entries?

If for whatever reason you do not want to remove the braces from a
numeric field such as `date', you can achieve this by removing the
element numerical-fields from the user variable bibtex-entry-format.

(The element numerical-fields has been part of the default value of
bibtex-entry-format for longer than I have been the maintainer of
bibtex.el (since ~1999).)