This should be documented somewhere. This post will be prewriting for such docs.
Recently I realized that Leo must insert sentinels into external files even if the user never uses clones. Indeed, sentinels create **identity**, the notion that a particular nodes starts at *this* place in the external file and extends to *this other* place. Identity is a persistent, invariant attribute of a file: Leo recreates all the nodes of the external files when re-reading the file. It's really that simple, but let me discuss some consequences: 1. Identity remains even when the contents of a node changes. Thus, there is *no way* to use content-related mechanisms to recreate identity. This means, for example, that git can never help recover identity. 2. Leo's sentinels mark an *arbitrary* range of text within the external file. Thus, @auto files can never be as flexible as @file nodes. To repeat: sentinels are necessary for clones, but sentinels would still be necessary if clones did not exist. Edward P.S. The hugely complicated (and now abandoned) "new @auto" import code attempted to create a pseudo identity based on the imported outline structure. It was not as flexible as @file nodes because the structure had to correspond to class/method/function structure. Furthermore, the pseudo identity was fragile because renaming classes, functions or methods could break the correspondence between former nodes and newly-changed incoming nodes. EKR -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to leo-editor@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
