Comment 5 for bug 169120

Hi

I'm really a beginner with Inskape, and I ran into this problem when copying a large group containing clones at 3rd or fourth level. In the case I'm referring to, the group resulted from a pdf import and the clones were just characters, with the original being invisible in <defs>, as I learned afterwards.

As described above, when pasting in another drawing, all the clones are missing (so that all the text is gone), but the status bar says "group of N objects" (the number being that of the original). At first I had no clue of what was going wrong in this process and thought Inkscape was so buggy that it was not even able copy from one of it's own drawing to another.

I think it's important to fix this annoying problem which may turn inexperienced users away from Inkscape. At the very least the warning in the status bar regarding orphaned clones should appear whatever the depth of the clones in the pasted elements.
One way to provide a real fix is like Jimmac suggested : the paste operation could unlink a parent which is not in the clipboard. Other ways are possible: one could copy the parent in <defs> of the destination drawing, which seems the good thing to do for the case I ran into.