Gustav Wikström <gus...@whil.se> writes: > I'm continuing on my proposal to introduce a "document" element in > org-mode and the idea of seeing everything before the first headline > as the base level 0 outline for a file. I've attached two patches that > I'd like some public review of before pushing to master. > > Patch 0001 introduces the document element into org-element.el, and > some restructuring related to that. > > Patch 0002 makes it possible to use property drawers at the document > level. I've hopefully covered all related commands to make this work. > And I've added a bunch of tests to guard against future regressions. > > Waiting for your comments!
This is a very interesting idea, and I don't want to dismiss your work, but I am concerned about how much third-party code will likely break by changing the results returned by org-element for parsing an Org buffer. I haven't thoroughly studied all of the code in your patches, so I may be wrong, but I think the breakage could be extensive. For example, simple operations like destructuring the results of org-element parsing functions may be broken. Have you done any investigation into this issue? Maybe there should be a transitional period in which the existing org-element parsing functions would work as before, and the new document-level elements would be returned by a new org-element document-level parsing function. Frankly, if there is breakage,the transition would probably take a few years, because there is a lot of code out there that has worked for years and may not be updated or replaced for years.
