Debian alternatives support for bibtex
Hello!
BibTeX is a file format and a tool for managing references. Created in
1980s, currently it's a de facto standard for LaTeX bibliographies.
Many LaTeX editors and tools (Emacs, Vim, rubber to name a few)
provide tough integration with BibTeX tool.
However, original BibTeX tool by Oren Patashnik is an old piece of
software and does not always fit well to modern way of doing things.
Most notably, it does not support Unicode.
Alternative implementations of BibTeX tool do exist, of which at least
the following are currently available in Debian:
bibtex8 (texlive-extra-utils)
rubibtex (texlive-lang-cyrillic)
nbibtex (nbibtex)
pybtex (pybtex)
The problem is that existing LaTeX editors and tools expect BibTeX
binary to be named bibtex. To solve such problems, Debian introduces
alternatives system. I propose that we make use of the alternatives
system to let user select preferred bibtex implementation.
Norbert has pointed out the following prerequisites for bibtex
reimplementations
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=539482#22):
1) The program should support every option of the original bibtex;
2) The program should produce the same output as the original bibtex.
I believe bibtex8 and nbibtex do fit the criteria right now. I think
we may safely introduce bibtex8 and nbibtex as bibtex alternatives.
My motivation is however to be able to use pybtex as bibtex
replacement. Of the bibtex reimplementations listed, pybtex is the
youngest, but looks the most promising. 100% compatibility with
original bibtex is one of the project primary goals
(http://pybtex.sourceforge.net). Currently options of the original
bibtex are not supported, but the author is working on it.
I believe we should support pybtex as bibtex alternative as well. We
might assign it a low priority, but it's important that user is able
to choose it manually. Please note that 99% bibtex calls do not supply
any options anyway, and having Unicode-compatible bibtex is a *major*
relief (for Russian users at least). Even if there are minor output
incompatibilities (I didn't encounter any yet), they will eventually
be reported and fixed like every other bug.
Thanks for reading this,
Andrey Paramonov
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