On 06/05/2018 12:17, Jonathan Fine wrote:

Juergen points out that changing bibtex mind break things. I'd like to ask,
is this the right place for the present discussion?

According to https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/code/, the present list
"is intended solely for discussing ideas and concepts for future versions
of LaTeX".

According to http://tug.org/bibtex/, the mailing list for [bibtex] bugs and
discussion is at http://tug.org/pipermail/biblio/

There are github repositories for biber and biblatex.
https://github.com/plk/biblatex
https://github.com/plk/biber

I think putting the current source for bibtex up on github would be a good
first step for Oren being able to do the right thing for bibtex. And it
might provide a better place for carrying out the present discussion.

In terms of the source code for the BibTeX binary, the TeX Live SVN sources area (which acts as a 'home' for a number of programs) is available in a mirrored form on GitHub: https://github.com/TeX-Live/texlive-source. Notably, that allows one to fiddle about with sources and see if they still build: it's set up for CI testing. Of course, the current discussion is likely not at the level of detailed code changes.

(Some of the discussion here applies to the standard .bst files: those are I think simply in [texmf]/bibtex/bst/base, so again in the TL SVN but the 'Master' part, which is too big for GitHub.)

Joseph