[PD-dev] pure-data CVS

[Miller Puckette]

Hi Olaf et al,

I think that putting the indocator in the object box would cause misery,
because whenever a new name clash arose everyone would have to go edit
all their patches ... worse yet, what if two libraries are merged or for
some other reason the name of a library changes...

So, it would be better somehow to be able to specify where to find specific
classes as part of Pd's run-time environment, similarly to how "path" now
works.  This isn't a real solution either though... what if you're using
an abstraction which assumes a different "gauss" from that of the calling
patch.  I don't know what to offer for that scenario!

cheers
Miller

> 
> I think we should try to find a way  to avoid nameclashes! Taking the above
> example, someone might only be using the maxlib library and thus [gauss] is
> perfectly allright. Let's say someone else is running Pd with footils library,
> there one would get gauss from footils... Not what we want, I guess!
> 
> On the other hand, I think, it would be rather easy to implement a mechanism
> that tell's pd from which library to load an object from when typing
> [libraryname.objectname]. This could be used to force Pd to use gauss from
> maxlib, not from footils in case both are present. But, right, this makes object
> boxes much longer.
> 
> BTW, what does Pd right now if there are two identical objects? Does the one win
> that is loaded into Pd first? (I gues the order is Pd core objects -> libraries
> -> single externals -> abstractions ?)
> 
> > I'm not sure,
> > how a "using namespace maxlib" could be implemented or be useful in
> > the PD programming language.
> 
> We allready have a similar thing when specifying which library to load. I don't
> see any differences here.
> 
> I think the best - and most difficult to implement - way would be to create
> objects as usual but to save information about the libraries / namespace
> (invisibly) in the pd patch. In case one of the libraries is missing on another
> machine, one would get an error message instead of an object from a wrong
> library.
> But then we still need a mechanism to force Pd to use a special library.
> 
> Olaf
>