Hello,
I'm programming a plugin to try to avoid some of the problems we are having with reference and connections and render layer management in particular (sometimes, often, they don't do what they are supposed to do and eventually crash maya).
So I'm doing a plugin to perform some operations every time the scene opens, so that we don't have to rely on the reference edits to do it. I'm not trying to program a generic reference edits system to avoid using maya's, that would be foolish 
, but trying to solve a simpler problem (because a small set of operations is allowed and saved).
My question is if there's a way to perform operations involving referenced nodes without generating reference edits (because I will restore these operations every time the scene opens or the reference gets loaded). One option is to clean those edits when saving the scene, but it adds some extra work every time the scene got saved that gets tiring with big scenes and doesn't promote frequent saving. It would be better if they can be avoided, maybe something in the lines of the refresh MEL command or something else.
Any help or suggestion would be appreciated,
Thanks!