On 05/02/2007, at 17.12, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
apart from that: personally i am not convinced that the database should be created
on the fly from CVS for various reasons:
- code would have to follow a certain outline in order to make
this work
Ok. I thought that such outline was already established by m_pd.h or "the way" to write externals.
no, this won't help you. there is no point in documenting that the object understands "open <symbol>" messages, if you don't know what the object does. i always thought that pdb is not a help-patch replacement but a
place to find an object that does certain things (like: being written by
somebody ;-))
I agree. I would only fetch object names from CVS to get a complete
list. I assume a complete list of objects can infact be fetched by
parsing the code in CVS. (Naturally stuff not in CVS would not make
it to the database that way.)
- separation between code and documentation is rather low (coders
usually hate to documentate their stuff; so a host of volunteers is needed to do the documentation; they don't necessarily need to
interfere with the source-code for this task)
- accuracy tends to be low with automated systems
so i think that the database ought to be manually maintained.
Ok. I was just suggesting what i thought would be the easiest way to keep the database accuracy high, since, as you say, coders don't necessarily do the docs - or just might not see the use for a
database. That's all.i think we don't disagree here. i think most things i said are
implicit in your original email. (i said: "use CVS to initially populate the db, but the real work
is in maintaining the db manually")
Yeah, it seams so. Too bad it took me a few email's to get it.
My question is then; does it makes sense to start writing such "parser"?
And a suggestion: It might be good to debate here how the database
should be designed to best do it job. Fx. would it be an idea to make
a set of (not necessarily disjunkt/non-intersecting) categories/
labels objects/libs could fit in - like math, audio, control, graphic
(inspired by http://puredata.info/dev/PdLibraries)? I mean, there
must be a quite a few opinions on how the database could be organized
in order to be of most use.