bug#36252: 26.1; bibtex-generate-autokey does not use use date field

[Colin Baxter]

Hello,
>>>>> Patrick M Niedzielski <patrick@pniedzielski.net> writes:

    > Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> skribis:
    >> Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes: This was five weeks
    >> ago, and there was no response, so I'm closing this bug report.
    >> If progress can be made here, please respond to the debbugs mail
    >> address, and we'll reopen the bug report.

    > I’d like to reopen this bug, and submit the attached patch which I
    > believe fixes the issue. This patch teaches
    > ‘bibtex-generate-autokey’ to prefer an ISO8601-formatted ‘date’
    > field when present, and fall back to a ‘year’, and is implemented
    > using Lars’ ISO8601 parsing functions.

    > Just some implementation notes: I don’t believe Ryan’s original
    > patch works as documented when ‘bibtex-autokey-use-crossref’ is
    > non-nil.  In this case, his patch would seem to prefer a
    > crossref’d entry’s ‘year’ field to a local entry’s ‘date’
    > field. More concretely, with the following BibLaTeX,

    >  @misc{doe1995some, title = {Some work}, author = {John Doe}, year
    > = {1995}, date = {1995-01-01}, } @misc{, title = {Another work},
    > author = {Anon Y. Mous}, date = {1990-03-12}, crossref = {entry1},
    > }

    > When generating a key for entry2, the original patch would prefer
    > using the year 1995 to the year 1990, which is unintuitive. The
    > attached patch implements a different behavior instead, in which
    > an entry’s own ‘year/date’ field are prefered to the crossref’d
    > entry’s ‘year/date’ field. In the above case,
    > ‘bibtex-generate-autokey’ will generate a entry key with the year
    > 1990 rather than 1995.

    > Additionally, we prefer to use the ‘date’ field when present over
    > the ‘year’ field. This behavior is probably more correct, since
    > BibLaTeX deprecated the ‘year’ field in favor of its own ‘date’
    > field, which only should occur in BibLaTeX-flavor files. Note that
    > this is a breaking change from the prior behavior, but only when
    > an entry has incompatible ‘date’ and ‘year’ fields.  If a file is
    > meant to support both BibTeX and BibLaTeX, the ‘date’ and ‘year’
    > fields should contain the same information.

I am a heavy user of bibtex, but I am puzzled over the 'date'
field. Publications have a 'year' ok, sometimes a 'month', but never
have I seen a 'day'. So how would a user enter (YYYY-MM-DD)? Is it
perhaps the date of entry of the record in to the file? Sorry to butt
in, but I am curious.

Best wishes,

Colin Baxter.