... and a question. Some initial points: * it would be nice if insets were buffer agnostic * we have tried not to store a Buffer ptr in the insets and have largely succeeded, but not quite. That biggie insettabular stores the buffer. * cut and paste still makes use of current_view.
It seems to me that difficulties arise because we haven't separated cleanly the concept of copying an inset and inserting it into a buffer. Implementation 1 ============ Store a Buffer ptr in the inset, but do not copy it when the inset is copied. An inset with (Buffer * buffer_ == 0) is perfectly valid but not operational, something that can be enforced by Assert(buffer_) in all methods using it. The inset would become "active" after a call to Inset::insert(Buffer *). We could lose the buffer parameter passed to so many of these methods. Implementation 2 ============ Similar to (1) but don't store the Buffer *. Instead have a flag bool active that is set after a call to Inset::insert(Buffer *) which would now initialise all those things that need to know the buffer. Eg, MakeAbsPath to insets storing the relative path to a file but needing to know it's absolute path to do anything useful. Personally I prefer (1), but they could be identical to the outside world; that's just an implementation detail. But either implementations could get rid of current_view from CutAndPaste. Only InsetInsert on paste. What do people think of this? I've been thinking about this because I played a little with my BibtexCache last night. The cache stores bibtex databases and these could/should be added as bibtex insets are created. However, the inset c-tors do not know the Buffer that they belong to, so we can't add to the cache because we don't know the abs path to the bibtex file. Hence the desire for an explicit Inset::insert(Buffer *) method that would be used here to add bibtex databases to the cache. It's a good thing to set the cache as early as possible so that it can fork the process to run bibtex on the file in the background so that the .bbl file is ready to use as soon as possible. Gives us elegant labels on citation insets. With a little care also gives us a references list of cited references in ascii or docbook export. Angus
