Re: New exporter, beamer confusion

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com> wrote:

> ... 
> 
> I get the feeling here that the new beamer exporter was written
> without a lot of real-world user requirements. Certainly, it's
> understandable that HTML, LaTeX article-style and ODT exporters would
> be more widely used and more important to get right first. For beamer,
> though, I can't reconcile the announcement ("Even though the internals
> are completely different, the new exporter mostly behaves like its
> predecessor. There are only a few noticeable changes") with the fact
> that the new beamer exporter is a rather different animal that
> completely breaks compatibility with org files written for the old
> exporter, and may actually require a complete redo of the org markup
> for each file.
> 
> I know my emacs-lisp chops are not up to the task of fixing what is
> broken in the new beamer exporter. I can supply a couple dozen source
> files, to help decide what level of backward compatibility is
> feasible. I'm not sure how else I can help.
> 
> At least, it would be good to clarify, with respect to the
> announcement, if the new beamer exporter is intended to be reasonably
> backward-compatible with the old (with not-too-intrusive tweaks). If
> that was the intent, then it's not ready for release. Otherwise, I'd
> be happy to help draw up an upgrade path for people like myself who
> have developed workflows for the old exporter that will eventually not
> be supported anymore.
> 
> In the meantime, I must stick with the old exporter, though I'll keep
> the discussion alive to hash out on the mailing list what needs to be
> done to make the new one production-ready for me.
> 

I'm sure Nicolas is up to his ears in prep work, but eventually I'm sure
he or somebody else who knows more about it than I do, will comment.

Just as a general precaution, I wouldn't rush to judgement based on
my fumbling attempts: these were small experiments done without knowing
anything about the new exporter to begin with. I hope that they did more
good than harm, but it *is* just a hope on my part. Don't mistake them
for authoritative information.

Nick