Re: [O] [RFC] Document level property drawer

[Gustav Wikström]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your comment! I can assure you that you need not worry
about the propsed patch here in terms of your workflow. This is in no
way a hasty, sloppy work. Care has been taken when developing it to
not break anything existing. I hear your concerns on the larger topic
of keywords though. But that's not something that is changing in this
patch.

Some more comments below.

> I'd like to just quickly chime in in support of Adam's caution on this
> issue. I can absolutely see advantages to document level properties, I
> have written many code fragments that rely on the use of keywords and
> expect org filensyntax to be consistent with what actually exists. I
> use these code fragments to hold together a somewhat fragile workflow
> that allows me to use org in a work environment that is not especially
> receptive to simple text documents. I have invested a lot of time in
> making those systems run and sometimes even I don't entirely remember
> what I did to make them possible.
> 
> It would really, really suck to have those systems break. It would
> take me a lot of time to track down the causes and change what I
> needed to. VMs that currently pull in Emacs andnorg and my code would
> stop working. Old versions of my files would no longer render
> properly. My efforts to make my courses and other writings effectively
> reproducible by others would be significantly set back. Etc. I think
> these are the kinds of difficulties Adam means to describe.

Again, caution is ofc taken. In no way does this patch change any of
your existing properties. If something, it proposes a way for you to
simplify your setup if you at any time in the future choose to do
that.

The patch that is applied is tested and no existing functionailty is
changed. Ofc, if you have a critical flow I'd advice you to use the
stable branch of Org mode and not rely on the master branch, since
that branch from time to time will get bugs in it.

Regards
Gustav