On Mon, 8 May 2006, Chris McCormick wrote:
people have just let the patches languish. One of the ones that makes me sad is your tool tips patch - how cool it would be if inlets had tooltips!
Yeah, I liked them too :) It is more a question of limited time and motivation. I just have too many branches of Pd related work going on which are not finished. I still think the patch is worth something, as people can see what it needs to implement such a feature, and there is an explanation by Miller how to do it correctly, without changing the pd base class.
There are other things that I would like to see, like a "debug cursor", where you can go to every outlet with the cursor and just listen to what is coming out and/or print it automatically to the console.
Actually the features tracker would be the right place to put these ideas, maybe someone finds the time to implement them.
Günter
he includes patches when time permits and also explains why he doesn't include others.
I haven't found his explanations to be always particularly explaining, and I don't expect them to always be, but there are some biggies for which his explanations were even more disconcerting than the lack thereof.
Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton often drop patches completely silently. Andrew Morton gave a really good explanation of why this is neccesary at Linux.conf.au a couple of years back. It's the right of the "benevolent dictator" to accept or reject submissions for whatever reason. And it's the right of the developer to fork if they don't like the direction the mainline is going in. It's also their right to be too busy to explain things, though as we see with Pd this might discourage some people from contributing.
Perhaps it is reactions to his "disconcerting explanations" that is putting him off from giving more detailed explanations? Who knows. My point all along has been that a little bit of politeness and respect can go a long way.
I don't mean just the patch submission system, I also mean discussions that lead potential patch submitters to decide whether submitting patches is worth doing.
Yeah, it seems like Miller doesn't always indicate the development direction he is going in, and if he did that it might help things along. This could be because he isn't employed by someone like the OSDL and is pretty busy as a researcher. Then again, there are a heap of tasks in the TODO file which people seem to be ignoring and working on other stuff instead, often stuff that is quite perpendicular to the development direction of Pd main.
Best,
Chris.
chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx
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