On 12/11/23 15:29, Christof Ressi wrote:
Ok, I have a come up with the following solution: I moved the multichannel section into a dedicated patch and open it with [;pd open <name> <dir> 1( when the user clicks a bang button in the main help patch. It's not perfect, but kind of works for my purposes.
so the user only gets the error if they click on the bang? hmm.
Yes, it is not perfect. This could be avoided, if Pd had a way to query the version at runtime (see https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/issues/928). I thought about adding a (private) message to the AOO objects that returns the actual Pd version via sys_getversion(), but this seems a bit overkill.
- personally i wouldn't care to much about error messages in help
patches (as in: going through hoops in order to avoid them).
I do...
since in this case you control the actual error message make sure that it is friendly enough (e.g. just telling people that they will need a newer version of Pd in order to use this cool feature) - i strongly believe that we can expect people to actually read and understand an error message (and not just seek help just because "lines were red"). it's not that Pd's error messages are very obtrusive)
The error message itself is friendly, but in this case the user did nothing wrong - they just opened a help patch! - so I would *really* like to avoid them.
you could create two help patches and in the multichannel version *only* document the multichannel features and include the non-multichannel help patch as an ordinary object (probably with some "auto open" code. that way you wouldn't have to duplicate the common documentation.
Interesting. The big disadvantage is that the roles are reversed: what should be a subpatch is now the root window, so when the user tries to close it, it closes the whole help patch... So I guess I'd rather prefer my current solution.
But thanks for your input!
Christof