Dov Feldstern wrote:
Hi
w.r.t. bug 1820, I'm getting very confused about what constitutes a
format change and what does not.
My understanding is that you're introducing a 'format change' whenever
your patch makes LyX create a .lyx file that cannot be read correctly by
a LyX version immediately before your patch.
The obvious example is something completely new, like the listings stuff.
Subtle changes to existing features could also be 'format changes' though.
Generally, I think, a format change is when given an existing file F,
I used to get latex output X, and due to a change in LyX I now get
latex output Y.
The way I understand it, latex code generation has nothing to do
with format changes. Of course, people may still object if you're
adding something that requires a very new version of latex.
Format changes is when you're creating .lyx files incompatible with
the older LyX versions. The fix is to update lyx2lyx to handle it.
What you describe seems to be a 'output change'. These tend to
be unpopular too. People generally don't want to have to update
their old documents - but of course lyx2lyx can be used to fix this
*if* the lyx file version number is incremented (i.e. you force this
to be a 'format change' too.)
In such a case, we normally have lyx2lyx take file F and create file
F', so the F' generates output X with the new version of LyX.
However, is this what we want to do if we're fixing a bug?
Bug fixes sometimes needs a format change. If that is not ok due
to an upcoming release - then that bugfix may have to wait. Or
you can try for some kind of partial fix that do without a format change.
For example, let's assume that numbers in arabic_arabi are output
backwards (I think this is really the case, BTW, and it should be
fixed before 1.5.0 --- but my arabi setup is not working correctly, so
I'm not sure). When this is fixed, strictly speaking it's a format
change. What lyx2lyx should do in this case is take all numbers in
arabic, and reverse them in the LyX file, so that after the fix they
are still output in reverse.
But is that what we really want? Let's look at two users:
User A says: LyX is currently printing arabic numbers in reverse; I
want them to come out correctly, so I'll type them in backwards.
User B says: LyX is currently printing arabic numbers in reverse; this
is obviously a bug, and will be fixed. I'd rather keep the LyX files
correct, and I know that when the output is fixed, it will be correct.
Obviously for User A it would be good to provide a lyx2lyx fix, but
for User B it would be bad.
In this case, it'd depend on what kind of users you actually have.
But arabic is new in 1.5, isn't it? So perhaps there aren't so many
existing users to care for?
Helge Hafting
