[PD-dev] Re: garray_update

Tim Blechmann TimBlechmann at gmx.net
Wed Jul 6 09:42:15 CEST 2005


hi miller,

> Well, forking the source wasn't my idea... I knew it would cause
> trouble.
well, for me it seems to be the only way to get a working performance
system for me, that will do what i want without waiting for another
century.
basically the current devel branch has been extended so far, that it's
not easy to merge it with Head any more ... 
"diff -u Head/src/ devel_0_39/src/ | wc -l" are more than 12500 lines
(Head itself has about 66000 lines)

i stopped posting patches to the patch tracker, since the patches would
be way to big or depend on each other ...  

i'm currently thinking to fork off from pure data and release the
current devel code as pure devil because it's not the same software any
more and i'm loosing too much time with porting / merging ... (if i
would have worked on a day job during the time i read diffs, merged
files or rewrote things, i could easily afford a fancy powerbook
and a few licenses of max/msp)
i'd really prefer to spend my time improving pd / making music than
merging branches or rewrite stuff...

> In general, the question of scheduling graphics updates is hard,
> especially now that (arrays can contain (lists that contain (arrays of
> scalars))), etc. Having "garrays" separate from the "real" data
> structure mechanism was always a temporary measure, and now I'm glad
> it's gone.  But what this means is that now we need a more general way
> of updating changes to data. If I can think of a good one I'll get it
> into 0.39 (it's prety high on the dolist at the moment...)
i've already ported most of your changes from 0.38 to 0.39 to devel (not
the other way around, because that would be pretty impossible due the
amount of code), so i would probably fork off with pure devil when both
your changes to Head become stable and i consider my changes to devel as
stable.
i'm trying to keep (binary) compatibility as long as possible, but if i
have to break compatibility (e.g. to declare getfloatarray as
deprecated) i would definitely do that ...

pd has the potential to become a professional software, but i don't want
to wait for another 10 or 20 years for pd to become usable / threadsafe
/ low-latency optimized / professional.
with all the troubles of forking the advantage would be that i could
break Head and you could break devel without having to think too much
about the effects on the other branch ... (well, we don't care about
the effects at the moment, either :-(, which results in hours of merging
from Head to devel at the moment)

the best thing of course, would be to combine the efforts of Head and
devel/devil having several maintainers for several parts of pd (data
structures, scheduler, dsp kernel, messaging, midi, simd, gui, build
system, documentation, win32, osx, linux, irix, pda, cell phone,
microcontroller, whatever) ...

cheers ... tim

-- 
mailto:TimBlechmann at gmx.de    ICQ: 96771783
http://www.mokabar.tk

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