First I wish to come clean with one thing: I'd like to see LyX being used by the ms word people in the industry, so my take is: do not trust files someone send to you (see earlier discussions on collaboration)
> 1) I like the lyx format as it is BECAUSE it is not compressed, so I > would definitely not change the default format. Yes, that is very nice. Easy to generate lyx files from scripts, etc. Very nice and worth saving. > 2) I like the idea of an export format, which effectively compresses > all files necessary into a single file. This is very nice for > archiving final documents (lets call it .lyxa for lyx Archive). lyxa sounds like a nice idea, and there seems to allready be code for this. There are two things though. lyxa should, as I see it, keep everything in one place, all original paths will be removed, and it will be "everything in one directory" or possible one subdirectory for images, one for lyx files, one for bibtex stuff, one for .... and so on, as suggested. But basically everything in one place. Reason? If you need lyxa format, you are either archiving it for backup or sending it to someone. The recipient are never going to have the same directory structure as you. That will only mean failure to try to achieve. The easier way is to just loose the exact location if you are going for a lyxa file. The only time I can see that the exact location is important is when the images are changed and you don't want to update them manually in the lyxa file, but hey, then you are probably not receiving new lyxa versions back in collaboration with someone, so just keep your original structure and generate a new lyxa file if you need to send it to someone. I hope I've managed to make my point clear about that keeping the exact structure in a lyxa format is futile. > 5) .lyxa should contain information of the original location of the > foles on the system where it was created, to be able to update the > files not in the subdirectory. I say no. You do not want to trust someone on this, either sending your paths or receiving paths from someone else. If you trust your coworkers, set up subversion, use the same account, make it world readable... etc. > 6) One should be able to open a .lyxa file (which would modify the > files in the .lyxa but not the original location information (from 5)) > or imported (showing the differences of the files in the .lyxa and the > original files and update the files when confirmed from the ones in > the .lyxa) > > In this way, the .lyxa could be used as a colaborative tool (original > author exports, sends .lyxa to other authors, they open it, save it, > send it back, oroginal author imports it and confirms the files which > should be overwritten) and as an archive tool of finalised documents. As I said no to replacing existing files with files from a lyxa file, I say no to that, but I say yes to colaboration. I don't want to start another flamewar about collaboration, but from my viewpoint, don't trust your enemies lyxa files, add a "diff this new lyxa file against this lyxa file that I have currently open and display differences so I can accept or reject them"-button :-) This will work also when you are working with total trust. If someone includes an eps file that generates fractals and overload your cpu, well that is kind of hard to detect and I guess you'll have to live with it. IMHO: The lyxa format is what Lyx misses, if you have to send more than one file to send text and image, you are alienating 99% of the population. Then comes the question... should .lyx be available as a file format or an internal hidden format and everything is saved in lyxa format? But that can probably be decided in the future.
