I would expect that a Unique copy of a Movie Clip should create a copy of the previous Clip's trackers so that you can delete and create new tracking bundles, without affecting the old ones on the other clip.

Correct. I would expect that at least it would be possible to generate another unique datablock copy of a clip via the fake user. A more direct way to do it would be nice though, not only in clip but everywhere in Blender. Node Group has a similar problem, where there is no not clunky way to create a copy.

@Bastien Montagne (mont29): have an opinion?

No, I don’t really have an opinion here (don’t think hiding the 'fake user' usage from UI was ever my idea, I tend to dislike hiding too much of the dirty guts of an engine to its final user, in general…).

That said, this seems a very weird abuse of the system to use that 'feature' to copy an ID. Though I do realize we do not have a real proper copy ID feature currently (closest thing to it would be new copy/paste [also with ctrl-C/ctrl-V] of IDs in outliner…).

This is more of an UI topic really, how/where to add such 'copy ID' feature in our ID template, that’s for @William Reynish (billreynish) & UI mafia to sort out first I guess. Technically it’s pretty trivial to implement properly.

In any case, that would be for after 2.80 release now, imho. ;)

Afaik this is not an intentional change. For all normal IDs we still show the Fake User button, as well as the user count. Probably it’s just a bug that makes it not show here.

Later on, we can remove the Fake User button when all IDs are auto-saved, but even then I think we should keep the user count.

@William Reynish (billreynish) number button is hidden when there is only one user, and iirc, UI code was changed to show 'usercount-1' when Fake User is set (i.e. not consider FakeUser in user counter)? That is the issue here.

@Bastien Montagne (mont29) that has always been the case though? As far back as I can remember, IDs with a User count of 1 don’t show it.

It seems like this report is about the fact that the user count doesn’t show, even when users are > 1, which afaik is not an intentional change.

It certainly is an intentional change… had to git blame to find it: rBf2132b023734 (yeah, own commit even, given the date that was most certainly a post-BConf commit after some talk with someone :| ).

It’s dead easy to revert, but do we want to show again two users when FakeUser is enabled?

I think part of the problem is, that there is not really a second user, because the Scene doesn’t really “use” it. The thing is that in this case as well as in the case of Node Groups there is no obvious way to create a second user to begin with. So I would rather not make the user count hidden at all.

I would say Fake User is different than normal user. The UI doesn’t even use the F anymore, so to non-old-farts or developers it would not be obvious why enabling the shield icon (formerly know as F) would add a user. So, clicking the shield icon should not raise number.

In T65589#697042, @Philipp Oeser (lichtwerk) wrote:

Just to make sure I understand correctly:
...
[note 2: of course as a workaround in 2.8 you could open another clip and set it to the same path as the first one, but I guess this is not what is expected here...]

You cannot "open" the same clip as another unique instance, Blender treats it as the same entity and ignores the 'open' function. Ideally you should be able to create a full copy that you can remove the original tracking data from OR restart with a clean version of the media.

I'm also not a huge fan of hiding the existance of fake users in the UI. While I understand that it confuses new people (trying to avoid the term "new users" here for clarity's sake), it also "forces" them to learn about how Blender handles data in general, and what the concept of user counting is. A fake user IS a second user of a datablock, as long as there is something else referencing the datablock. Not showing that will all the more confuse all the other people who have learned about the user count system.