About manifest file and lossless conversion between bundled and plain-text formats:
It has been clear that we need to keep the original filename information to pack/unpack a bundled .lyx file. Such information can be saved in a manifest file, or along with the insets, yet to be decided. However, to achieve lossless conversion, we also need to keep information about manually added files such as layout, source code etc, and which files to embed (assuming that we want to keep this feature). Because .lyx file does not save such information, the manifest file has to be saved, and re-used when we want to pack .lyx file again. This can be confusing. I would suggest that we add the manifest file to .lyx header, and *separate* embedding information from whether or not the .lyx file will be bundled. That is to say, we can allow users to set things like 'embed this file if saved in bundled format', and 'embed xxxx.layout along with the bundled file' and save them in .lyx file. When a plain-text file is loaded, they are ignored, but when we pack the .lyx file, they are used to direct how the bundle should be created. This is, as far as I can tell, the only way to achieve lossless conversion between plain and bundled .lyx format. What do you think? Bo
