Multi-month conferences make biber unhappy

[katrielalex]

Some conferences span multiple months, and the cryptobib citations write them as e.g. sep~/~oct. This makes Biber unhappy, since it expects integers for months:

Biber warning: [5804] Utils.pm:164> WARN - month field '9~/~10' in entry 'CHES11' is not an integer - this will probably not sort properly.

I expect this is deliberate and I should just ignore the biber warning, but wanted to bring it up in case it wasn't.

The list of such conferences in abbrev3 is:

$ grep -ir month cryptobib/abbrev3.bib | grep \~ | cut -d\{ -f2 | cut -d' ' -f1 | tr \n , | sed s/month//g
acisp15,ccs06,asiacrypt94,asiacrypt03,asiacrypt15,ches05,ches11,cqre99,rsa12,rsa13,rsa16,eurocrypt82,eurocrypt98,eurocrypt02,eurocrypt06,fc05,fc06,fc11,fc12,focs89,icalp74,icalp03,icisc06,icisc11,isc02,isc06,latin14,ndss07,ndss10,pkc13,pkc15,podc98,provsec08,stoc95,stoc09,stoc14,trustbus04,trustbus11,

[thomwiggers]

I'm not getting any warnings for those with Biber, but I get other warnings:

Biber warning: [54074] Utils.pm:193> WARN - month field '12~9--13,' in entry 'AC01' is not an integer - this will probably not sort properly.

[sarahscheffler]

I realize this is an old issue, but I think I'm still having the same issue as @thomwiggers in 2022. Not the end of the world, but certainly annoying:
"BibTeX: legacy month field '8~20--24,' in entry 'C:GruLuRis17' is not an integer - this will probably not sort properly."

[thomwiggers]

I've been having the same issue as you @sarahscheffler recently (but with biber). It seems as if the preferred field is date nowadays.

[thomwiggers]

I've created a few scripts that process crypto.bib and add date fields. There's a few edge cases that this causes problems for (Crypto 1993's month entries reflect the conference in 1993, but the year the proceedings were published, and the year in the C:xx93 entries is 1994), so I'm not sure if this should be merged upstream yet; but I have a fork with date entries on most records in https://github.com/thomwiggers/cryptobib-export

I created a github action that should hopefully keep it up-to-date with cryptobib/export.