[PD] puredatabase

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Wed Feb 14 06:07:20 CET 2007


Since we are talking about trying to get as many people involved in  
the documentation process as possible, it should be as  
straightforward as possible for Pd people to do it.  If each chunk of  
meta data is a Pd selector series, where the selector defines the  
type of meta data, and the rest is the data, then we have an easy to  
understand and parse format.

For example: [keywords sound oscillator( would be a useful chunk of  
meta data for [osc~].  This format could easily be parsed in Pd  
itself using no externals (unlike XML), and it is also easy to parse  
it with perl, python, etc. to generate XML, or whatever.

.hc

On Feb 9, 2007, at 1:16 AM, padawan12 wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:05:10 -0500
> marius schebella <marius.schebella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>>
>>>> I thought we (the potential users of the database) in this phase  
>>>> could
>>>> brainstorm and discuss ideas on how we would like it.
>>>
>>> I think this should be generated from the meta data in the help  
>>> files.
>>> For PDDP, we plan on using the help files as the central location  
>>> for
>>> meta data.
>>
>> I would rather have content (in xml style) and layout (webformat, pdf
>> format,...) separated
>> <object>
>>    <objectname>coolobject</objectname>
>>    <library>core</library>
>>    <description>blablablab</description>
>>    <tags>audio,streaming,web,keywords<tags-family>
>>    <help-patch>
>>     a pd patch...
>>    </help-patch>
>> </object>
>> (...and many many more).
>> parsing this meta data into the pd patches is probably easier. and
>> editing the metadata outside, too. (using copy, paste, replace)
>> m.
>>
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