Re: org-export-babel-evaluate=nil ignores ":exports results" setting - this has changed

[Derek Feichtinger <derek.feichtinger@psi.ch>]

Hi Chuck

On 21.02.2017 00:54, Charles C. Berry wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Feb 2017, Derek Feichtinger wrote:
>
>> When org-export-babel-evaluate is set to nil, I see a different 
>> behavior now as compared to earlier versions of org.
>
> Indeed.
>
> It is now *obsolete* and its behavior has intentionally been changed 
> as noted here:
>
In my current version from MELPA the info text is not yet reflecting 
this change. Thanks for pointing me to it.


> ,----[ C-h v org-export-babel-evaluate RET ]
> | org-export-babel-evaluate is a variable defined in ‘org-compat.el’.
> | Its value is t
> |
> |   This variable is an alias for ‘org-export-use-babel’.
> |   This variable is obsolete since Org 9.1;
> |   use ‘org-export-use-babel’ instead.
>
> and here
>
>      (info "(org) Exporting code blocks")
>
>> I think that this should be considered a bug.
>
> Allowing header args to be processed (as before) also allows for 
> arbitrary code to be executed.  The point of setting 
> ‘org-export-use-babel’ or `org-export-babel-evaluate' to nil was to 
> prevent this.  For that reason the former behavior was a bug.
>
OK. I can see that one wants to prevent most header args of babel blocks 
from being reeavaluated, but the :exports argument does not affect 
evaluation, but simply the representation of the result exported to the 
target document. So, I think that this argument still should be 
observed. Otherwise the resulting document would be completely changed 
once I introduce ‘org-export-use-babel’. I might want to introduce it to 
conserve the current code block results, while still being very much 
interested in exporting it to a different format, or re-exporting it at 
a later point (after having added new chapters that are manually evaluated).

So, I still feel that this is a very much needed functionality that has 
been lost on the way. I have made many documents over the last few years 
that relied on this functionality, e.g. files collecting logs or 
producing analysis results that were dependent on a particular state of 
a system at that moment of time. I hope that the observing of the 
:exports argument can be reintroduced.

Derek

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