On Wednesday 24 February 2010 04:43:23 pm Vincent van Ravesteijn wrote:
> Manoj Rajagopalan schreef:
> > 1. Is this change acceptable?
>
> I think so.
>
> > 2. This feature requires the IncludeBib.py script submitted by another
> > user/developer in the issue-log on trac:
> > http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/4624 Can the IncludeBib.py script be
> > bundled with the lyx distribution now? I didn't see the author permitting
> > the use of this script under GPL (maybe I missed it) but if this is the
> > case, I could write a script and submit that under GPL. Are there any
> > other adoption problems?
>
> I'm not sure you should use this script.
>
> We can export LaTeX, we can run LaTeX, we can run bibtex
> (LaTeX::runBibTeX), we can do something similar for bbl files as for aux
> files (LaTeX::scanAuxFile).
>
> So, can't we do it without python scripts ?
>
> Vincent
I'm a C++ guy to the core but playing devil's advocate, here are reasons why I
think Python might be a good idea:
(1) Python is portable and the performance hit in using a script instead of
compiled C++ might be negligible/acceptable in this case
(2) Richard Heck mentioned that the invasive approach of creating another
native format will then also rope in PDF and DVI issues among other things
(3) text find-and-replace for the final step (replacing the bibtex
bibliography command with the contents of the .bbl file) might be simpler to
code in python (unless the paragraph-iteration in Buffer::doExport() is
modified to detect the bibliography and follow a different code path)
(4) The framework to invoke scripts as filters already exists, so the python
approach might involve fewer changes and bug-possibilities
(5) The developer learning curve to implement this change is small
-- Manoj
