Re: Buffer local alias?

[Andreas Leha <andreas.leha@med.uni-goettingen.de>]

Hi Tom,

tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye) writes:

> Aloha Andreas,
>
> Andreas Leha <andreas.leha@med.uni-goettingen.de> writes:
>
>> I am not as organized as Tom is.  So the chances to use my up-to-date
>> orgmode and successfully export any of my org documents from a year ago
>> (they are almost all 'Literate Programming' documents and, thus, maybe
>> more fragile?) are slim.  I do not have numbers, but it seems like I'll
>> need to adapt such documents all the time.
>>
>> I know that this problem is a problem of balancing backward
>> compatibility with new features, better design, etc and cannot be
>> solved.  And I see the win in (most of) the breaking changes.
>>
>> But let me just express my vote for even more awareness of people like
>> me, who do not read all release notes, forget most of the messages from
>> the mailing list and as a result need 2 hours to export some document
>> from last year again today.
>>
>> A change like this one (renaming sbe to org-sbe) is a small change and
>> will only be an annoyance in one years time.  The drop of the implicit
>> naming of call lines, for example, was (and still will be for some of my
>> files) a bigger issue.
>
> I fully agree that it is challenging to prepare an Org mode file that
> can be "moth-balled" for a while, then resuscitated to full
> functionality without a lot of work.
>
> Perhaps one way to deal with this is to have the Org mode literate
> programming (reproducible research) file choose which version of
> Org-mode to use.

Due to my difficulties in reproducing my own document from a year ago, I
stopped calling my Org-mode documents 'reproducible research' ;-)

> Something like the following?
>
>   #+name: org-mode-version
>   #+begin_src sh
>   cd path/to/org-mode-git-repo
>   git checkout rev
>   #+end_src
>
>   # Local Variables:
>   # eval: (and (fboundp 'org-sbe) (not (fboundp 'sbe)) (fset 'sbe 'org-sbe))
>   # eval: (sbe "org-mode-version")
>   # eval: (org-reload t)
>   # End:
>
> I haven't the faintest idea if this is a "good idea" or a snake pit of
> potential problems. Is the idea worth experimenting with?

IIRC, org-reload is not too well supported and might even vanish one
day.  I could not find that discussion on a quick search, though.  So,
this approach might be potentially problematic, indeed.

Regards,
Andreas