Hallo, Roman Haefeli hat gesagt: // Roman Haefeli wrote:
On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 08:48 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
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.
of course, it would be error prone, but what other way is there to find out all the objects of a certain library? i see only two ways: looking into the helppatches or visiting the website of the external, if there is one (not having the possibility in pd itself to view the content of an external is kind of awkward, IMO)
Looking at the help patch will only give you a list of help patches. Many objects especially abstractions miss help files, while some help files may not be for single objects (like "otherbinops-help.pd").
A better aproach is the class browser in DesireData which I mentioned.
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].
i see, although this is only a problem in pd-extended, afaik. that means there is no other way than having to add an extra -helppath for each external. since the good ol' .pdrc has been considered to be deprecated many times , iirc, and i couldn't find a way to add a -helppath through the menu, this concept seems to be problematic.
Recursively added help-paths would also break stuff or at least create confusion on standard Pd. For example, assuming you have a help patch for maxlib/scale-help.pd and Gem/scale-help.pd. Which one should be used when you look for help on [scale]?
A solution could be directory namespaces.
This would work for exmaple if you have a collection of patches in a directory "netpd" and if you will always use them with the directory prefix "netpd/".
So for example your "netpd" directory is in "mystuff", you have "mystuff/netpd/run.pd" and "mystuff/netpd/run-help.pd" inside which calls and explains [netpd/run]. Then you add this to .pdrc/pdsettings:
-path mystuff -helppath mystuff
and all is well. Now exchange "mystuff" with "/usr/lib/pd/extra" and it gets even easier.
However you won't be able to easily omit the "netpd/"-prefix now and simply use [run] unless you use pd-extended, because either Pd will have a hard time finding the correct help file or your help-file will have problems finding the object it is intended for. Just try it.
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__