Since it was somehow hidden I post here again what I wrote in the "Latest changes in manuals" thread:
I was now able to reproduce the changed paths. According to http://www.lyx.org/trac/ticket/9815 this works as designed: If a document contains a valid \origin tag, then all relative paths are changed to absolute ones constructed from \origin on saving. This is in general the wanted behaviour (and the reason for having \origin at all), except for one case: Editing LyX documentation in a directory which is not the system dirctory as determined by the Package class in src/support. In this case, the \origin machinery assumes that the user did copy the doc to some other location, and that he wants to keep it separate from the LyX installation. This assumption is wrong if one edits the docs in the source tree, and I agree that something needs to be done for this case. Unfortunately I am not sure what to do. Here are the alternatives I can imagine: - Set \origin to unavailable for all docs in the sources. This would be easy to do, but also mean that we need to change it during installation (which is currently only implemented for autotools, not in cmake and not in the windows installer) - Implement some heuristic to recognize if docs in a LyX in lib/doc directory of a source tree are edited, and do not change paths if that is the case. Not very transparent for the user, and strange things can happen if the heuristic is wrong. - Do not change the paths in general if the files can be found using the relative paths. Has the additional benefit that this is also the wanted behaviour if I copy a whole directory of LyX files (including referenced graphics) to a new location. Disadvantage would be that the machinery does now depend on the presence of external files, and it is not guaranteed that the file that is found is the correct one. Are there other possible solutions? I prefer the last one, since it does not get into the way of people who know what they are doing and copy a LyX file including all needed dependencies. The current solution punishes these people by requiring them to repair the incorrectly changed paths by hand, or by forcing them to disallow setting \origin in the preferences (but the latter does not work if you receive files from collaborators which have \origin set). Uwe and Kornel voted for the last option as well. I'll see if this can be implemented easily. Georg
