On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 01:10:23PM -0400, Richard Kimberly Heck wrote:
On 10/16/23 21:22, Isaac Oscar Gariano wrote:
Currently \def is used for all math macros that have no option
arguments. This has caused me hard to debug errors because it
silently clobbers pre-existing LaTeX commands. On the other hand,
\newcommandx is used if there are optional arguments, and this gives
a helpful error message if the command is already defined. (if you
really do want to override the command, you can just put
\let\mycommand=\undefined in your LaTeX preamble, although with
unicode-math I often have to put this in an \AtBeginDocument).
This very simple patch just makes LyX always output \newcommandx
instead of \def for math macros.
Unfortunately, this means if you want to have any math macros you'll
always need the xargs package (but it's a small package release all
they way back in 2008 and is included in TeXlive), hopefully this
won't annoy users too much.
Since we already depend upon xargs, this won't be a problem.
However, I think this might count as a format change, because it
changes the exported LaTeX. If so, then it would have to wait for
2.5.0. But I'm not sure about this, and perhaps the people who
actually know about this will think it's safe. I'd like to hear.
Independently from that, this is a change that needs a lot of testing
and it is risky to perform near a release.
You might want to have a look at 76dc2c0d3002db, which is where this
code was introduced. It looks to me as if the previous code was
actually very similar to what you have, but minus the prefix=\global
part, and that we could then just have added that. It's a bit puzzling
to me why Stefan did it the way he did, but he's long since not around
to answer that question.
I seem to remember that he was actually forced to abandon the
\newcommandx approach due to some technical reason. Maybe there is a bug
report with details about this.
--
Enrico
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