[Tb] Aliases and children

One rule of Tinderbox is that an alias can't contain children. This is
one of the excellent Mark Bernstein's apparently unshakeable articles
of faith... but I am not so sure.

Sometimes one wants to gather things together using an agent, and have
those items bring their children with them. In my case, more often
than not. For example, if I'm writing an article or a paper -- let
alone the book I am writing, & which would be almost impossible without
Tb -- I will start with a whole bunch of random-ish notes. Some of
those notes will spawn children. Eventually, some will make it through
to the final cut, and I will mark them "for inclusion" or whatever.

I then make an Agent to gather everything marked "for inclusion".
Ideally, at that point, I'd just export the text for further work. But
I can't -- because the Agent will only gather the mother notes, not
their daughters.

My own desideratum here would be to have a user-switchable Preference -
"Aliases contain descendants" <Yes/No>. I know the thinking is that
you'd rapidly hit terrible recursion problems, but the old (no longer
supported) biblio/KM app Papyrus allowed you to unfold links in a
similar way and it didn't cause problems. Sure, you eventually hit the
point where you were back where you started. At which point you knew
you'd travelled the whole route, and it was time to stop...

Anyone got any thoughts on this?
Received on Fri Jan 2 14:48:02 2004