[PD-dev] solution to the "only one config file" issue

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

This problem seems to mainly affect Pd developers, so I think we need  
to be careful about adding complexity that few people would use and  
many people might be confused by, especially when we can do it in a  
simpler way (like the quote says below :)

You could easily use a simple shell script to manage the .plist files,  
then it would make it easy to switch them.  Something like this (this  
is off-the-cuff, so it might not work):

---------------------------------
#!/bin/sh

# location of plist that Pd reads
PLIST_ROOT=~/Library/Preferences/org.puredata.pd
PLIST=$PLIST_ROOT.plist

# which config to use (first argument)
CONFIG=$1

cp -f "$PLIST_ROOT.$CONFIG.plist" "$PLIST"
---------------------------------

Then you'd choose the config you want by doing:

./config-switcher.sh experimental

or

./config-switcher.sh vertex


It would not be hard to expand the script to save new configs as well.   
(This is also a good candidate for the "scripts" section of CVS.)

.hc

On Mar 22, 2005, at 11:15 AM, B. Bogart wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> As most of you know I'm very annoyed that I can only have one user-wide
> plist file. This is when I'm testing experimental versions of externals
> and such, I actually have to rename my plist so that PD does not load
> it. Ugly solution.
>
> Anyhow I thought another way of fixing the problem of multiple
> configurations would be negative options when starting PD. Say I have  
> an
> experimental Gem in ~/libs/ and a stable version in ~/libs/cgc.  
> Assuming
> my plist (.pdrc) contains a path for the former then I would start PD
> with this in order to load the unstable version:
>
> pd -without-path ~/libs -path ~/libs/cgc -lib Gem
>
> So that we could turn on, and more importantly off, any options in the
> plist that we don't want for this run.
>
> Anyhow just an idea.
>
> Maybe there are not that many people out there with 4 different  
> versions
> of libs on their machines? (For Gem I have: experimental, cgc, vertex
> array, multiple gem-window etc..)
>
> Some kind of configuration manager would also do the job, as would the
> ability to switch to a global configuration (plist) file (pd -pdrc
> ~/mine.plist).
>
> B.
>

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