On 07/05/2018 23:24, Juergen Fenn wrote:
> I think that's a good point. Given the pace of development in LaTeX
> nowadays, I wonder whether this is the way to build a new standard. Who
> cares about latexrelease, \UseRawInputEncoding, etc. after all?

Hopefully no-one cares much and few people notice.
But that is the point and why core systems need to be maintained and 
occasionally updated.

While UTF-8 was first designed in 1992, it's fairly certain that no one 
was writing latex documents in UTF-8 when latex2e was designed in 1993.

Now virtually all editors and operating systems default to UTF-8. The 
fact that for most users, most of the time, "it just works", required 
some internal changes and those changes may possibly affect documents 
doing odd things in some cases. Hence the latexrelease and 
UseRawInputEncoding possibilities for reverting some of those internal 
changes, but they are not something most users should ever expect to use.

What this means for bibtex isn't so clear but the general issue of 
whether you need to update the core system and how to manage 
compatibility in edge cases that are adversely affected by any change 
applies of course to any software not just bibtex of latex.


David

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