bug#10254: 24.0.92; Local variable bibtex-dialect has no effect

[Roland Winkler]

On Tue Jan 17 2012 Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I'd expect one "typical" usage is to have (setq bibtex-dialect 'biblatex)
> in the .emacs file somewhere.  With your new code, the effect of this
> setq will depend on whether bibtex.el is loaded before or after
> executing the setq.
> That's my main source of worry.

I don't see a "normal" usage of bibtex.el where something in the
init file could result in an early loading of this file such that it
could matter where in the init file this variable is set. (The code
has only three autoload cookies.) In other words: under "normal"
circumstances the init file should be fully processed before
bibtex.el is loaded. Also, like other packages the existing code of
bibtex.el has more internal variables that would aquire wrong values
if user variables are somehow set too late after loading. That's
hard to avoid.

Kind of (un)related: just a few days ago I rearranged my init file
because it called appt-activate too early giving me rather strange
side effects. (I have not debugged details.)

> > value of this variable in their init file. Yet when they want to set
> > this variable interactively (via the menu bar or the command
> 
> I have no opinion on whether the interactive commands set it globally or
> buffer-locally, but that choice is orthogonal to the use of
> make-variable-buffer-local (just call make-local-variable in those
> commands if that's the behavior you're after).

I'll modify the patch such that one can choose whether one gets
local bindings or not.

In any case, I want to provide a command that *can* bind
bibtex-dialect buffer-locally because it's not completely trivial
that the global / local value of this user variable matches the
global / local values of various derived internal variables.

Roland