Hi all,
I'm not sure it is exactly what this discussion is about, but let me suggest another point of view about clone behaviours.
In my opinion (and my practice), clones would be much easier to use if there was no difference at all between clones and masters:
the user should be able to edit any clone as if it was the master, and vice versa.
Let me give more details and some reasons why I think so:
Pros:
1- the distinction between clones and master is a purely technical point about where the information is stored: it has no artistic content and has no reason to interfer with the user workflow,
2- atm, if you delete the master, all the clones become free. Suppose you did it by mistake thinking it was a clone... your
mistake can go unnoticed for quite a while, and there will likely be no
undo then! (yes, we could also raise warnings, but they would be annoying 99% of the time). The only work arround I found to this is to systematically move all the masters to a separate dedicated layer so that they are clearly identified...
It would be much simpler if, when deleting the master, one of the clones was made real and used as the new master by all the others.
3- editing clones is impossible atm; you have to edit the master. But the master is most likely not the instance you would naturally choose (because it's far away from the area you are focusing on or whatever...). Why blocking the user? Why couldn't we edit the clone as if it was the master, and apply the modification to all the relevant objects?
4- this behavior is what is used in most 3d software I think (at least in blender): objects can share data (like mesh definition wich is similar to our path "d" attribute) and you can access and edit this data from any object using it...
Cons:
1- it is not what comes first in mind when reading the svg
format! Data is not really shared among objects there. However, I think it is only a matter of software behaviour and UI, so this is still 100% compatible with svg format; we could also use "symbols" for that, whose definition is slightly more symetric.
2- it is not the way it works now and most we are accustomed to think about clones as having a master... The good point is they would still have one, and you could keep your workflow. It is just a matter of adding more features to clone collections.