On 01/01/2010 02:00 PM, Tommaso Cucinotta wrote:
I'm thinking that a user may legitimately want to include the same
.lyx segment in multiple documents, i.e., a .lyx file should be
allowed to have more than 1 master at the same time, or, put in
another way, parent->child it is actually a DAG and non-necessarily a
tree.
Yes, there are several reasons one might want to include a single
document in multiple other documents. I do this all the time, and LyX
will allow you to do it. It will even compile properly, since each
document knows what its children are. The issue, as may already be
clear, is not the parent->child relationship but the child->parent
relationship. A child document does not necessarily know, in advance,
what its parent is, or even if it has one. This is a dynamic matter that
depends upon which documents are open, etc.
Why does any document need to know its parent? Because, e.g.:
(i) We want to allow people to insert citations into the child document,
when the bibliography inset is in a parent.
(ii) We want to be able to number the sections, etc, appropriately,
throughout a family of documents.
(iii) We want to be able to access math macros defined only in a parent,
or in a file specifically of math macros that is included in the parent.
(iv) We want the Outline to show us the structure for the whole family,
even when it is viewed from within a child.
And so forth. But now, if you think about it, it's incoherent, given
these motivations, for a child to have more than one parent at a time.
Richard
