Hallo, Roman Haefeli hat gesagt: // Roman Haefeli wrote:
- what is the 'offical' (non-deprecated) naming-scheme for help-patches:
help-<name>.pd, <name>-help.pd or just <name>.pd (the last seems not to work, but i found some helppatches named after this scheme) since pd's own helppatches are named after <name>-help.pd, i assume this the 'official' one.
It was agreed that <name>-help.pd is preferred scheme. This way you still get a kind of alphabetic order instead of all files starting with "help-" and you could in priciple use the keyboard to navigate a help browser (worked with the old one, but doesn't work with the one currently called help browser).
- where are they supposed to be?
i found helppatches in the following locations (i didn't place them by myself, they all have been put there by their installers)
- pd/extra/
- pd/extra/<lib>/
- pd/doc/5.reference/
- pd/doc/5.reference/<lib>/
- pd/doc/<lib>/
- pd/doc/<lib>/<blablablabl>/<blablabl>/
^ since the helppatches cannot be reached from the helpbrowser, when they are located in pd/extra,
This must be another bug of the help browser: It doesn't seem to care about user-settings regarding -help-path.
i'd say this is not the way to go. it's handy to have an overview of all objects of a certain lib. also would it be nice to have the helppatches of the libs separated from pd's own helppatches.
I don't think the location of the help-patches should be used to get an overview of the objects in a library. There is no direct connection between these two attributes, it would be artificial and error prone to create one IMO. Still for making installation and packaging easier, subdirs for every library have advantages.
from the users point of view the following points would make life easy:
-all helppatches are named after <name>-help.pd, which makes browsing easier
Yes, definitely
- pd's own helppatches are located in pd/doc/5.reference (as it is now)
Good.
- helppatches of the libs are located in pd/doc/5.refernece/<lib>
Possible. pd-extended generally works that way IIR. However you need to use pd-extended's "-libdir" extension (or is this already in 0.40) to make it work when using directory prefixes.
the only problem i see here, is that one has to add an extra -helppath for each lib. it would be nice, if that could be avoided by searching pd/doc/5.reference recursively.
No, this would break a lot of things, especially directory prefixed names like [maxlib/scale].
For my abstractions I like to keep it simple and I just place the help patches next to the original abstractions. This way I directly see which abstraction are still without help-patch. For "installing" these patches I think, the libdir approach makes the most sense.
NB: I think, we should not try to organize the file layout by looking at the current help browser. IMO the browser has a broken design, because it's just a filebrowser limited to a certain directory, and it's a worse filebrowser than the builtin Tk filebrowser was. A real help browser should look different anyways. What I have seen in DesireData is going in the right direction IMO, but it's a radical change, os don't hold your breath.
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__