Richard Heck wrote: > That's my general sense, too: It's a corner case, and File>Export isn't > that difficult. > > For what it's worth, I don't really like the "save in the original > format" idea either. It's nice that LyX can export to older formats, > etc, but I'm not sure we really want to people to try to collaborate > across major versions and then start reporting bugs when it doesn't > work. There is just too much that can get lost when exporting to an > older format. We know, in fact, that we do not always export usable > documents to 1.6, and there is no way around that. > > Another issue is that LyX 2.0 documents might use modules (or other > layout files, or local layout) that were introduced (or heavily > modified) in LyX 2.0 and so are in the 2.0 format, not in the 1.6 > format. There is no support in layout2layout for exporting to older > formats, so this is another reason that exported documents might well > not work properly without major intervention.
Completely agreed. Nevertheless it is a good idea IMHO to backport trunk lyx2lyx to the stable version regularily (at least as long as it does not include refactoring). This is almost zero risk, and IMHO it is OK if the loading of newer formats is not as stable as loading of older formats. After all, these come from a development version. > People who want to collaborate with users of earlier versions (or use > development versions for their own work, etc) should have the users of > those earlier versions install their (newer) version of lyx2lyx. This > isn't that hard to do, and it is by far the easiest solution. But it still requires discipline (new features must not be used). IMHO People who collaborate on a regular basis should use the same major version, period. This could be made easier by offering "portable" versions of LyX for the different operating systems. Then you can have these (together with your documents) on a USB drive, and are completely independent of the computer you use for editing (as long as the OS matches). An automatic download button is too dangerous IMHO. If you offer that you need to keep track of security issues, e.g. the recent SSL certificate desaster. Georg
