[Refdb-users] Bug report with bibtex backend

[<mar...@mh...>]

Hi Florent,

Florent Ingwiller writes:
 > So there is a serious problem with the bibtex backend. As  I don't have 
 > time to understand the complete implementation of this backend and of 
 > refdb in general, I can't track this bug further.
 > 

After a quick test I can unfortunately only agree with your
statement. In fact, bibtex support is utterly broken in the current
release as a result of the major changes from 0.8.x to 0.9.

I've checked in a fix which at least works in the few tests I ran. I'd
ask you to try it out. Either use the patch for backend-bibtex.c
attached to this mail, or download the current version 1.8.2.10 from
CVS (in the libdbi-pre1 branch).

In order to get this fix out in a reasonable amount of time I've made
two simplifications which hopefully won't hurt too much: first, you
can only use citation keys, not numerical IDs in your citations (but
this is what BibTeX users prefer anyway, I guess). Second, you can't
use citations from different databases at the moment. Regardless of what
the manual says you have to use something like the following:

\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
This is a citation \cite{Nakane2002}
\bibliography{bibtest.bib}
\end{document}

Please keep me posted about your tests. And I really appreciated your
extensive bug report. This indeed helped a lot to track down the bugs.

regards,
Markus