On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Angus Leeming wrote: > Asger Kunuk Ottar Alstrup wrote: > > No. Provide a "submit template for LyX inclusion" feature instead. > > Oh, C'mon!
I'm serious. The feature will be much more used if templates are made, and distributed to the users. Why not do this? Explain to me which use case a per document external materiale inset definition is superior to the scheme I propose. Compare with the paragraph and character styles in Word. You can define your own styles, and chose to save them in the concrete document, or in the "global" document, such that they are available for use in all documents. While this seems like a nice thing, in fact it is a pain in the arse. Why? Because as a programmer, we think it is best to keep things separate, and therefore do not want to pollute the global namespace with our funky styles. And the result is that the funky styles are never there when we need them. You end up spending a lot of time shuffling styles around from one document to the other. And when you start refining your styles, version hell brakes loose. You never know which document has the latest and greatest styles. I do not think there is a need for separate name spaces for external mateerial inset templates. If a template is useful in one document, there is a very high probability that it is useful in another document as well. And if one user finds a template useful, there is also a good chance that another user will find it useful. So, instead of complicating things ever more with namespaces for templates, and all the machinery you have to develop to support moving things from one namespace to the other, just implement features to make it easy to share the templates. And the easiest here is simply to use lyx-devel as the clearing house. You get peer review, and the versioning problem is solved. If this reasoning does not bite on you, then I would even suggest that you only keep one namespace, but offer the users the option to distribute selected definitions as part of a document. I.e. instead of introducing a new namespace, just provide an easy to use distribution mechanism, where we stealth the templates into the documents. When received, the user is asked whether we would like the included template to be registered on this machine. If not, the document will not work. If the user has the same template in advance, it should ideally check whether they are identical. If not, it should ask which one the user wants to use. But I still prefer the other way: When you use the lyx-devel list as the distribution channel, the templates will get peer review, and thus improve. The result is better templates that can be used by everybody. If you worry about the traffic, calm down. Maybe ten people have ever made templates, so I do not expect that you will be swamped by hundreds of new templates each day, although that would be great :-) > > Yeah. And I can call myself Father now as well ;-) > > Congratulations!!!! Thanks. Regards, Asger
