Hi Ivica, Jonathan,
Thanks for the response.
@Ivica:
> Why not simply use cyclone help patches provided in pd-l2ork that
> already conform to the pddp standard?
The pd-l2ork help patches with standard format indeed look much better
than the 'free-style' pd-extended patches. That is why I use these as a
base.
But I do not copy them directly for several reasons:
- the lack of curly lines in pd-extended make pd-l2ork formatted patches
a little less clean than possible,
- not all patches are correct, usually because the original had the problem,
- the pd META information is incorrect (probably copied from an pd-core
object),
- to learn as much as possible of these objects, I try then to see if
they work and how. This can lead to changes to the patch.
Of course a mass copy would be a fast way to improve cyclone help, but
with the long term goal in mind, I think this slow method could result
in better help files. Later I will see how they look in pd-vanilla and
pd-l2ork and make adjustments.
@Jonathan:
> But then Pd Vanilla aficionados might complain that to use cyclone they
> would be forced to also install the pddp library for [pddplink] and
> [helplink], because those objects do not ship with Pd Vanilla.
> Otherwise they would end up with a lot of broken objects in those
> help patches.
>
There seems to a 'rule' to make help-patches only dependent on vanilla
objects, and this makes sense. But maybe we can use a rich help-patch to
generate a vanilla-compliant one (see below).
> All the little Pd libraries in Debian don't help this problem, because
> not every GNU/Linux distribution uses apt. (Nor does OSX or Windows,
> for that matter.)
>
The other main distribution tool is rpm. It might be interesting to know
how much of the "Linux-market" uses either deb or rpm.
For Windows and OSX, there is no ready made solution yet. But other
software packages have a cross-platform package distribution system; the
examples I know are perl (ActiveState) and cygwin. But is probably not
trival to build or adapt something for Pd.
> Also, I believe Hans emailed awhile back asking if I'd do the work
> of removing the PDDP template boilerplate from the tutorial revisions
> I did. He wanted me to leave only the [pd META] subpatch, because
> that's evidently the only part Miller wanted to add to Vanilla.
Making help-patches as much as possible is also one of the modifications
I make to the pd-l2ork help-patches. So far I ignored the pddp code. But
removing the line with "pddp/pddplink" seems to work and this can be
scripted. But for pd environments that always have the complete set, it
is a great feature to have links.
Greetings,
Fred Jan