@whale-av Not so flippant...it led me to my answer!
That patch I posted earlier started out life as an abstraction that was supposed to be included over and over again in some parent patch, and I had made it graph on parent. Later I got rid of the graph on parent when I reworked it to be used in [clone]. When I make an empty patch I get:
#N canvas 846 196 450 300 12;
(I think "restore" is only needed to close subpatch definitions) and when I add GoP I get:
#N canvas 846 196 450 300 12;
#X coords 0 -1 1 1 85 60 1 100 100;
But when I remove GoP, coords remains but its arguments change:
#N canvas 846 196 450 300 12;
#X coords 0 300 1 299 85 60 0;
So it's not quite the same as what I started with, although it seems like it ought to be.