indirect-buffers and text-properties

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

I've been playing with indirect buffers which I have managed to ignore
for many years, and finding them very useful for a variety of things.

One property that seems very useful is that they can be in different
major modes, while still sharing the same contents. This strikes me as a
particularly useful property of indirect buffers which I would like to
experiment with.

One problem, however, is that as well as the text, indirect buffers
share the text-properties; so anything based on text-properties is
shared. The most notable example here is fontification; syntax
highlighting is the same in the two buffers regardless of major mode.
So, for example, if you have a lisp-mode buffer with an latex-mode
indirect buffer, the lisp-mode buffer looks like latex mode (for reasons
I haven't worked out yet, auctex seems to win most of the time,
regardless of which is direct and which is indirect).

I had a quick look at the code, and this doesn't appear to be
deliberate, but rather a by-product of copying the text; although, given
that my knowledge of C is basically zero, this is pure guess work.

So, question, anyone know why the text-properties get shared with
indirect-buffers and is it possible to stop?

Phil