----- Original Message -----
From: Martin Peach martin.peach@sympatico.ca To: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at Cc: Pd List pd-list@iem.at Sent: Sunday, 6 January 2013, 4:23 Subject: Re: [PD] translate the Start Here! page
On 2013-01-05 22:36, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
On Jan 5, 2013, at 6:22 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Ed Kelly morph_2016@yahoo.co.uk To: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com; Hans-Christoph
Steiner hans@at.or.at
Cc: Pd List pd-list@iem.at Sent: Saturday, January 5, 2013 5:18 PM Subject: Re: [PD] translate the Start Here! page
OK, no need to fight. This is about a version of Pd-extended that
has been a
very long time coming, that had many issues to resolve, that went
offline and
was unavailable at the start of the workshops I teach. I also
can't get my
students to download a version of Pd-extended that isn't
finished and
won't run on their machine. This is their first experience of
programming.
They'll give up straight away!
Of course. I'm just giving you a beginner's perspective;
it's my own
memory of that perspective that drives me to work on tools which are
currently
only marginally useful to me personally. The supermajority of
discontent
among your students tells me that this perspective hasn't changed
much.
By far, that is currently the fault of the software-- the documentation
is
currently too slim and core pd building blocks (and interface) too
crude
for the question "how do I find more objects" to be anything
like an ancillary
question.
A static out-of-date list is better than nothing, but as far as
potential dev
energy I'd really rather see that put into core docs like the ones
listed
on the bug tracker, which are extremely lacking. That FLOSS list will
hopefully
become obsolete, but the help docs won't-- even if they're
dropped from
Pd-extended they're still publicly available.
-Jonathan
While I have agreed and disagreed with various points in this discussion, I
think Jonathan's two paragraphs above sum up my feelings on this topic too. Jonathan has put together a really great system for help from the meta data to the search plugin, now we need to put actual content and meta data in our help patches and it'll all be findable in a multitude of ways. All this could even be used to generate the static listing in the FLOSS manuals: just take the object name, then get the library and description from the [pd META].
Yeah, and we need the spec for [Pd META] to be known. For devs maybe en entry in the externals HOWTO?
There are some great ideas here that need further investigation.
Generation of static web documentation from [Pd META]. It's the only way such online documentation could be kept up-to-date as Pd is indeed a "moving target"
This would require [Pd META] to contain more information than just the library name, author and version. Since this is already universally applied across Pd extended, it's ready to be modified and extended. Does this sound like a good idea?
Ed
Martin
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