On Mon, 15 Nov 2004, Matju wrote:
Sorry for the delay.
No problem, we have time.
On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, guenter geiger wrote:
On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Matju wrote: Hi, Although I might sound a bit repetitive, the devel branch is not meant to be published.
One question... what's "pd extended" ?
right, but still, the CVS devel branch was not meant to be published. The fact that it was doesn't change the intention it was created for, or does it ?
Besides, Pd was also not intended to be a clone of MAX, and yet people use it a lot like that, and then Pd was also not meant to do video processing, and yet people use it for that. (and so on)
What I mean is that if ever there's a significant incentive to publish binaries of the devel branch, then it will happen. (it may also happen if one mistakenly believe that there is an incentive, but, whatever.) Maybe everything will go well, but if some of my patches are rejected for whatever reason, be it for lack of time, lack of understanding, or lack of agreement, I don't see why I'd have to wait in line forever.
That said, I will attempt to collaborate, but I'm not completely sure that submitting patches and applying them in scrambled order is a system that will survive long. The chance of interpatch conflict increases as the number of patches increase and that their spread factor is big (some patches modify 5 files or more, and not necessarily because the fix is lousy and made without care for diffing: sometimes you just _have_ to modify 5 files)
Actually patches that will not get accepted should be rejected and closed. This way I hope that there won't be too many patches lying around.
There is a webpage on sourceforge where you can submit patches (check out http://pure-data.sf.net/bug-report.php).
I don't know why features should be added on a page called bug-report.php; it's not a showstopper, but frankly, the name of the page is counter-intuitive. I wouldn't have looked there. The menu says "Bugs, Patches, FR", but seriously, "Patches" already has a strong, different meaning in the Pd world, which is confusing, and then FR doesn't look like a familiar abbreviation at all.
Yes, you are right. What if I change bug-report.php to trackers.php ? I can also call the menu entry "Trackers", or just write "feature requests" instead of FR, but it makes the menu entry quit lengthy. The reason for concentrating on the bug reporting aspect was that I thought that is what most of the users would do.
BTW, how normal is it to call "bug fix" what is really an added feature? And then how arrogant is it?
That was not my intention. I am trying to rephrase the section on patches in order not to sound arrogant. I just sort of mixed up the two purposes of patches, which is bug fixes and new features. Thanks for pointing it out.
Its really easy. Submitting a patch is just one click away.
No, it's more of a matter of duplicating the work done by CVS, but a bit more manually, and then figuring out dependencies and conflicts with all other patches that have been applied since the beginning of the branch (or of the last major checkpoint). The "click away" is just the last easy step.
You are right, I wrote that as a buzz word, so that people accept the system. Submitting a patch is actually easy, creating it not.
The question now is, who is responsible for creating the patch. I think that it is not a lot harder to create the patch than to merge back the changes in CVS.
Of course your case is a special one, because you have changes that are going deeper into the core of Pd than others. I don't know really how to solve this, it is likely that the system we have is not up to this task. What would be your proposal ? Lets talk about it.
Btw, if I'm supposed to keep a few dozen .diff files around for submission and also the .diff's of other people to check for potential conflicts, how is CVS supposed to be useful to us at all?
The same, probably it doesn't work. I would be more than happy to drop all this patches stuff and go over to a more open development model, where people can change the Pd code directly, but it is not up to me to decide this.
Guenter