Example does not work for commit 31e603e about pandoc-letter HOT 4 OPEN

I'm facing the same issue. The diff between both commits shows the document class can be overridden by the documentclass variable.
For some reasons it may be set somewhere to something different.
If I set documentclass in the document, it works:

---
documentclass: letter
...

This variable can also be set with the pandoc command:

pandoc --template=template-letter.tex -V documentclass:letter ...

from pandoc-letter.

$documentclass$ appears to be shadowing \documentclass

PR inbound that would keep the change but rename $documentclass$ to $userdocumentclass$, but, given that some of those constructs in the template are part of letter I'm not actually sure accommodating user-specified documentclass is good?

from pandoc-letter.

Hi!
I am sorry I provided the patch without noticing that pandoc sets the documentclass to article by default and thus broke this template.
See:
https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/cc371a9485241db3e0101180432e2122d023a9bd/src/Text/Pandoc/Writers/LaTeX.hs#L109

I see that @to-json made a good fix - changing this to userdocumentclass if people want to specify a different documentclass and avoid the hassle of having to provide letter by default. Thanks!

Apologies!
Juan

from pandoc-letter.