no year in bibtex entry, reftex gives an error

[Frederik Fouvry]

Symptoms:

With BibTeX entries that do not contain a year (because it is fetched
from the crossref entry for instance), reftex tries to sort them for
display (with `reftex-bib-sort-year'), and that fails because instead
of an expected string value there is `nil' as value, which cannot be
converted into a number by string-to-int.

Suggested solution: treat nil specially in reftex-bib-sort-year, or
(before entering reftex-bib-sort-year) in case there is a crossref
field, fetch the year from there.


In GNU Emacs 21.3.50.41 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2005-01-11 on cc.at.coli.uni-sb.de
Distributor `The XFree86 Project, Inc', version 11.0.40201000
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: POSIX
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: address@hidden
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_GB
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: LaTeX

Minor modes in effect:
  reftex-mode: t
  auto-image-file-mode: t
  desktop-save-mode: t
  global-auto-revert-mode: t
  iswitchb-mode: t
  show-paren-mode: t
  recentf-mode: t
  display-time-mode: t
  auto-insert-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  unify-8859-on-encoding-mode: t
  utf-translate-cjk-mode: t
  column-number-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t
  abbrev-mode: t

Recent input:
c SPC " y e a r " SPC C-y C-a <right> <right> <right> 
<right> <right> <right> <right> <right> <right> <right> 
<right> <right> <right> <right> <right> <right> <left> 
<left> ' C-e <return> <right> <right> <right> <right> 
<right> <right> <right> <right> <right> <right> <right> 
<right> C-s y e C-a <up> C-x 0 C-x C-f <up> <up> <up> 
<return> C-s b a d <backspace> l d w i n <down> <down> 
<down> <down> <down> <down> <up> <up> C-] <help-echo> 
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> 
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> 
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> 
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> 
<menu-bar> <help-menu> <report-emacs-bug>

Recent messages:
Scanning bibliography database other.bib
Scanning bibliography database robustness.bib
Scanning bibliography database proc.bib
Scanning bibliography database collections.bib
Scanning bibliography database proceedings.bib
Entering debugger...
nil
Mark saved where search started [2 times]
Quit
Loading emacsbug...done