[AUCTeX-devel] Issues with Biber support

[Ralf Angeli]

Okay, so I found the first bug related to the Biber support.  The entry
"backend=\\(biber\\)" in `LaTeX-auto-regexp-list' prevents "biblatex"
from being added to the style list.  It does not show up after you load
a file and do `M-: (TeX-style-list) <RET>'.  With 11.86 it does.

I'm not sure how to fix this yet.  A nice way would be to add a style
file for biblatex and then let this activate Biber support when
"backend=biber" is found in the style list.  But this does not show up.
It might be that key=value pairs are filtered out, but I have to check.

Related to activating Biber support I also found the function
`LaTeX-biber' a bit odd.  It is called when the parser finds the string
"backend=biber" but the function tests for the string "biber" in the
match again.  Basically you can rewrite it as
(setq LaTeX-using-Biber (if LaTeX-always-use-Biber t nil))
which means that Biber support is enabled if the parser finds
"backend=biber" and the variable is t.  It is disabled if the variable
is nil.  Wouldn't it make more sense to enable Biber support without
looking at `LaTeX-always-use-Biber'?  Or can you use BibTeX even though
you requested Biber as a backend from biblatex?

The next problem is that `LaTeX-using-Biber' is a global variable.  That
means a LaTeX file requiring Biber can switch on Biber support and
another one loaded later which does not require Biber can switch it off
again, globally, i.e. for the other file as well.

Besides the issues mentioned above I think it would be a good idea to
split `BibTeX-Biber-file-extensions' into two variables, one for BibTeX
and one for Biber.  This will require to change the code which works
with these variables as well.  One reason for this is that when you now
insert \bibliography you will get completions for *.ris and *.xml files
even if you use BibTeX and not Biber.  Not good.

Sorting all this out might take some time. )c:

-- 
Ralf