bug#5189: BibTeX mode problems: non-existent directories, faulty regexp-opt

[Roland Winkler]

Hi Michael

Thanks for the bug report!

First of all, I am including an email I recently got from Stefan
Monnier as it applies to your bug report, too. (Oh well, you are not
the only one doing this...)

(And I am CC'ing this email to 5189@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com so
that hopefully we do not get yet more bug reports.)

On Sun Dec 6 2009 Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Please, please, pretty please don't ever Cc: to
> emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org or bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org: instead, send your
> email directly there and nowhere else.
> 
> It's not your fault, but this leads to messed up bug-reports if people
> reply to the message they got (and then Cc emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org or
> bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org along the way as well, thus creating more
> bug-reports in the tracker).
> 
> Hopefully we'll figure some way to address this brain-damage, but for
> now, we have to live with this restriction,

Now on your report:

> bibtex.el uses regexp-opt, which introduces new capturing
> parentheses that throw off variables like bibtex-type-in-head,
> which is a regexp subexpression number. (Really, regexp-opt should
> be rewritten to only use non-capturing parentheses!)

I cannot reproduce this. For me, regexp-opt does give "shy group"
constructs \(?: ... \) that work fine with subexpression numbers
like bibtex-type-in-head. Can you give a more specific test case
based on emacs --no-init-file that gives you incorrect behavior?
It appears to me that you might load some code that redefines
regexp-opt before loading bibtex-mode.

Also the subject line of your report mentions "non-existent
directories". Can you be more specific?

Roland