Thanks for the critisism Guenter,
I agree, a preferences dialog is ideal (and what I want, and I'd start writing it now If I knew enough about PD internals to do so).
Yes you are right that a launcher shines when one worries about libraries. Single externals have a lot of advantages, but can we get rid of libraries altogether? Collections of related objects, like Gem for example. The new chaos release will have code shared between the objects. I guess the question is will the number of libs drop to some amount small enough to be managable?
different PD config files would be a great feature, very nice if a menu of them came up when you start PD (if desired)
Great that Miller is going this way, changing stuff on the fly fantastic!
So where does that leave us? There is still a need for such a program, at least at this time. Is it worth the effort to develop it when it would be phased out by PD functionality soon.. Well the hope is that the code, or some part thereof, would end up being integrated into PD. Another reason we're planning on using tcl. I think it would be valid to create the LME, if its code could be resued in PD, and if it will be a year or more before on-the-fly parameter changing and the death of massive lib mamagement.
Just to focus the discussion one more time:
The idea came up when Matt and I taught a PD workshop. We did the installation of Gem as part of the workshop, and it was far beyond the skills of most people interested in using the software, to add the damn -lib Gem flag to the .pdrc (which is a painful file to edit without terminal!) I myself tried talking through the shortcut creation (under windows) process to one of the workshop memebers, it took 30min!!!! and that was only one library...
Is LME worth pursuing or not?
Ben
----- Original Message ----- From: guenter geiger geiger@xdv.org Date: Monday, June 2, 2003 5:05 am Subject: Re: [PD-dev] External Manager - Load my Externals
Ok, some (critical) thoughts:
- Preferences: again, a launcher is a bad idea IMO, it should be a
preference dialog. Don't think about software being written once and then its done. If you have the launcher, you will want to have preferences sooner or later, ...
- External loader comes from the concept of having libraries. I have
mentioned several times that this is not a good way how to write externals, because it merely adds complexity in the build processes and uses up more RAM.
We should get rid of the concept of libraries. (Hide the "external loader" in a "advanced" tab if you like, but don't write a program that is an "external loader" above all).
- Different configurations: I think this is a very good concept and
should be easy to add by using different names for pd config files.
Last but not least, Miller is already thinking about preferences, expecially for audio settings, and changing them on the fly is not too far away ...
Guenter
PD-dev mailing list PD-dev@iem.kug.ac.at http://iem.kug.ac.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-dev