Could use system-provided libbibutils, if available

[Michael Banck]

Debian now ships libbibutils, and Ubuntu will follow as soon as the syncs for intrepid (aka 8.10) will be processed. So it would be nice if configure.ac could check for a system-provided libbibutils and use that rather than the included source copy. Unless, of course, there are valid concerns about libbibutils code/API stability I am not aware of.

Original Bug report at http://bugs.debian.org/470302 :

Referencer upstream includes its own copy of the bibutils library. As
of recently, there is a bibutils package in Debian that referencer
could use (in principle). I maintain bibutils for Debian, so if
something (aside from the usual lack of time, not knowing about it, etc...)
is blocking referencer from using it, let me know.

[John S (jcspray)]

Desirable, but not without a few issues:
 - The bibutils in referencer has a few modifications to its behaviour. I need to find a bibutils-3.39 tarball to diff it against to find out what these are.
 - referencer accesses internal data structures which no sensible library would expose. The reason for that is that libbibutils is primarily for transmogrifying one format into another, whereas referencer actually (ab)uses it for loading bibtex.
 - Last time I checked libbibutils was completely undocumented

[David Bremner (bremner)]

 Sergey Kirpichev has made a patch that at least makes referencer compile with current debian bibutils.

http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/r/referencer/referencer_1.1.1-1.1~rc1.dsc

I can post/send you a bibutils-3.39 tarball if you can't find it somewhere else.

[John S (jcspray)]

David: if you could email me that tarball at jcspray at icculus.org it would be helpful. I shall try not to lose it this time :-)

That link seems to point to just a PGP header? I'm assuming you meant to link me to this:
http://mentors.debian.net/debian/pool/main/r/referencer/referencer_1.1.1-1.1~rc1.diff.gz. Somewhere buried in there I found 01_libbibutils.dpatch. I would not recommend applying that patch until this has been investigated further upstream. It breaks things. Honestly. For instance, some fields may get lost in import.

Also, I notice someone is applying Sergey's uf8 patch (https://bugs.launchpad.net/referencer/+bug/223763). That fixes paste but makes file import deviate from the existing behaviour of using latin1 files -- you're fixing one user's problem while creating another. That bug was reported to me less than 24 hours ago, and I am working on it -- please be patient and you can have a proper fix!

[David Bremner (bremner)]

On debian or (I guess) ubuntu, you can do

dget http://blahblah.dsc

will download and unpack a debian source package.

tar file by seperate mail.

d