Re: Buffer local alias?

[tsd@tsdye.com (Thomas S. Dye)]

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.  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?

Pleased to appear well-organized,
Tom

-- 
Thomas S. Dye
http://www.tsdye.com