Regroup Violates Syntax Expectations

[Caleb White]

I would like to re-report the following issue from 16 years ago: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/1461

I hope that it is obvious why it would be useful to dynamically resolve this variable.

I spent a long time trying to figure out why group_key.grouper was always None for me, and it's because the variable I'm using as the grouping token is being treated as a string rather than a variable.

Honestly this seems like a serious design flaw in the template language itself - why are unquoted tokens ever treated as strings? How is the user of the template language supposed to know whether a given token will be resolved as a variable or treated as a literal string? This is very confusing and I can't find any explanation in the documentation of why this is the case. I can't think of any benefit gained by all of this ambiguity, so I imagine the only reason not to change this is going to be backwards compatibility.

As far as I can tell, this bug is present in every version of Django.

[Tim Graham]

We ask that you not create duplicate tickets but rather write to the DevelopersMailingList to make your case to revisit the wontfix decision.

[Carlton Gibson]

Also Caleb, if you do follow-up, please include a minimal example demonstrating the issue, otherwise you're asking folks to do a lot of archeology in order to see the problem, and that reduces your chances of getting a timely response. Thanks.