----- Original Message ----- From: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@eds.org Date: Monday, May 26, 2003 12:24 pm Subject: Re: [PD] PD Launcher/External Manager

I think that making a system to track down various installers and install them is basically duplicating the effort to have pd developers use the CVS. If the vast majority of developers use the CVS, then there would not be a compelling need to have an elaborate system to track down externals since most of them would already be included in the installer. So I think working making the CVS as accessible as possible to all Pd developers, and encouraging people to use the CVS is more important.

I agree wholeheartedly that CVS would make things much more elegant and clean, and would hope all developers see the benifits and jump in.

In terms of the software I would like to keep several of the power options to be able to do things like have different versions of the same libs on one system (in different folders) for example I use a self-modified version of zexy that is different than the CVS version (changed the terms in cart2sph)

I think this should all be in Tcl since its cross-platform and already there when using pd. As for doing it 'inside' pd, it would easy enough to have a Tcl script handle all of the startup options, then launch pd. So basically, it would be like a GUI .bat launcher written in Tcl.
But I think we should also start moving towards a 'Preferences' idea, so that you can change these settings while pd is running. For now, you could just have the Preferences panel just rewrite the .pdrc, then you'd need to restart for the changes to take effect. But then, as developers are willing to dig deeper into pd, the Preferences could be made to change this stuff in realtime. That's my vision of how this should work.

I am thinking of it really as a graphical version of the commandline flags, so it is really preferences I suppose. I think it would be great to have PD change the loaded libs on the fly! (audio options?!) that would be really cool. (but I think a bit PD architecture issue?) until the architecture is there I think it makes more sense to have the GUI come up before PD startup. so that #1 PD users think about them as startup options, but also with the thought of gui preferences #2 no one has to worry about restarting PD to use the config, I don't that would become more usable than the startup-gui idea.

I dunno about the pdrc on windows.

In fact I don't use one myself at all, I just specify all the commandline flags in aliases etc..

On that note I did find a tcl lib that creates shortcuts, which would be a great way to store config sets under windows that would not require the launcher to be run after the configs have been made.

But a related question is, what is preventing Windows from having a .pdrc? Anybody know? Having .pdrc be standard across all platforms would simplify this effort.

.hc

Thanks for your crit!

B.