> (Terry) So will @auto still have close to zero impact on collaborated 
files?
> (Matt) It would be very tempting to delete something like this. It looks 
like a mistake or just some random unneeded cruft.

My present opinion is improving @auto is feasible technically, but 
infeasible in practice.

The killer problem: sections and organizer nodes are not possible without 
comments of *some* kind.

One could try for a "Goldilocks" solution: comments that are neither too 
large nor too small, but I don't want to try to predict what comments would 
be acceptable to this group or that group of people.  My default assumption 
is that somebody is going to object to *any* added comments, no matter what 
form they have.

Yes, one could avoid adding comments by not using organizer nodes and 
sections, but that's way too high a price.  Furthermore, even the best 
@auto scheme will cause more broken clone links than using @file.  Last, 
but certainly not least, @auto is inherently slower than @file because the 
result of importing an @auto tree must be verified by comparing the 
original file with the simulated write of the imported file.  The simulated 
write will almost double the time taken by @auto.

So for now, unless some radical new ideas arise, I am going to kill the new 
@auto project.

This project has not been a total loss:

1. It is now clear that @shadow can not be used for robust cooperation in 
groups.  This was an important Aha!

2. The new import code is really quite elegant.  The general ideas behind 
the code may come in handy later.  In particular, I enjoyed discovering a 
way to handle strings that can cross line boundaries in the line-oriented 
approach.

3. It was interesting to consider reconstituting clone links using unl's.

In summary, a beautiful idea has been killed by an ugly fact.  Worse, @auto 
was the last hope for truly convenient collaboration among Leo users.  As 
it stands now, people who want to use Leo in a collaborative environment 
must endure the deficiencies of @auto.

Your comments, please.

Edward

P.S.  With the @auto project dead, my plans for the near future are to 
release 4.11.1 and finish the vim-bindings project.

EKR

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