No, I didn't forget... But the discussion (eg Pluggo4PD) is getting to a point where I think "wow, interesting!" rather than "I can help here."

Here's a few thoughts anyway. More to show what goes on in the mind of someone who's just getting into the construction of the telescope after a bit of star gazing.

All this (incl below) said, I'd still love to help out in some way, by eg cleaning up / clarifying help patches, eg with some help from the developer.

When first starting to use pd, I attempted to make a manual for myself, starting out with listing all the objects (internals, then) with descriptions. When getting deeper into pd, I abandoned that idea because I preferred to spend my time on learning by doing. Still, a readable list of what-does-what would be welcome, and would have been then.

As a sidenote: a glossary of computer related terms would also have been helpful. By now i know what a subroutine is, but a year ago the first sentence of the template1-about.pd (at http://puredata.org/dev/pddp/template1-about.pd/view) would've already puzzled me, just like the term "metadata" does now. I can guess what it means, I can find some info, there's a wiki, but I think when you just get into pd there's a lot to deal with, so you don't necessarily want to get into even more. Mind you: I'm not saying everybody should be able to use pd with no effort. Of course this is an app you must want to use and be willing to dive into, I just mean that sometimes knowledge is taken for granted that not necessarily everyone jumping into pd has. Maybe this is not pd's responsability, I'm just mentioning what was / is troublesome for me.

padawan12 padawan12@obiwannabe.co.ukwrote:

Yes. At the risk of building a whole content management system (is puredatabase still built on Zope/Plone?) this seems the sensible format. At some point I would like to move some tutorials I've made onto the system. These are mainly HTML with diagrams and links to patches and sounds. A really thorough system would allow this and make it easy.

But, from a development POV might I suggest that this is ambitious and one would be best to concentrate on just getting it to work right with .pd files to begin with, then add the bells and whistles to allow richer content. But being mindful of future content types cant hurt.

One interesting and challenging enough problem that already exists is how to make sure that help/tutorial/exmaple patches that depend on certain abstractions and externals will always load.

This is a dependency issue not dissimilar to the pakage management needed in something like the Debian apt repository system. It may be possible to tag each resource with its minimum version and libraries needed, or it might be better to hold multiple verions of the same resource and be able to browse by platform and current Pd version.

The way I see it, Puredatabase is not just there to organise and structure documentation, it is there to make maintainance as easy as possible. We have an ongoing struggle to keep helpfiles up to date. One of the views, for maintainers, should reflect those needs. It should be easy enough to use so that anyone who spots an error or omission can quickly log in and make changes Wiki style.

Hope I'm not just prattling on about issues you've already considered.