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

[Roland Winkler]

On Mon Jan 9 2012 Glenn Morris wrote:
> 
> A better solution would be something like the following. However, it
> seems that at present bibtex.el is simply not set up to handle a
> buffer-local dialect. Eg none of the variables set by bibtex-set-dialect
> (bibtex-entry-type etc) are buffer-local. So it won't work right if you
> open multiple buffers with different dialects.

To clarify the circumstances of the original bug report:

Do you want to use buffer-local values of bibtex-dialect because you
do have multiple BibTeX files, some of which use one BibTeX dialect,
others use another dialect? -- Such a scenario is somewhat
orthogonal to the general notion of BibTeX that should provide one
database that is used for all LaTeX documents. That's why the
current code was not set up to support such a scenario. Yet when I
think about it now, I can imagine more rare cases that would benefit
from buffer-local values of bibtex-dialect.

In any case, buffer-local calls of bibtex-set-dialect are not enough
to solve this problem but one also needs buffer-local values of the
variables set by bibtex-set-dialect.

Also, I do not consider this a bug. In my opinion, it's more a
missing feature. So with Emacs 24 being already in pretest I am
tempted to say it would be more appropriate to provide a proper fix
in the next release of Emacs. I'll look into this.

Roland