[PD-dev] pd-devel revival

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Works for me.  The pd~ stuff looks big enough for a new release.

.hc

On Dec 10, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Miller Puckette wrote:

> Maybe I should just freeze 0.42 on the sooner-than-leter side so we
> can take our time on u_main questions.  Most of the stuff I'm working
> on is proceeding in fits and starts anyway.
>
> cheers
> Miller
>
> On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 05:49:14PM -0500, Hans-Christoph Steiner  
> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Dec 8, 2008, at 11:11 AM, Miller Puckette wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I've spent some time thinking about this.  I had only limited
>>> success pulling
>>> code from the 0.39 "devel" because there were so many changes,
>>> often with
>>> rationales I didn't fully understand, that I wasn't confident  
>>> about my
>>> ability to maintain whatever I ended up with.  However, I did
>>> manage to
>>> fold some of it back into 'vanilla'.
>>
>> Yeah, I hope we learned from that experience, it ended up being a
>> fast-changing fork, as far as I could tell.  I think it is important
>> to keep things slow so that everyone involved can know what's  
>> going on.
>>
>>> On the other hand, u_main.tk is such a mess that I don't think of
>>> it in
>>> the same way as the rest of the Pd code at all - I'm much more
>>> willing to
>>> take "patches" on it even if I don't understand them :)
>>>
>>> A couple of details.  First, I'm at work myself making a desire-
>>> data-inspired
>>> rewrite of all the dialog windows... maybe you shouldn't lose time
>>> on that
>>> till I have a chance to hack at it.  I'm also planning rather soon
>>> to add
>>> a new text-editor-window feature.
>>
>> Do you have a target date for this release?  I plan on working
>> starting now and thru January on this.
>>
>> A key reason for me wanting to do this is to clean up and structure
>> u_main.tk in a rational way.  It's a mess with different people's
>> coding styles, strange order, no "main()" equivalent, etc.  Plus a
>> lot of the code really avoids using Tcl the way it should be used,
>> and dates to Tcl 8.3.  This is be an opportunity to make clean Tcl
>> code, switch to Tcl 8.5 (which has big improvements on all
>> platforms), and make for an more easily extendable GUI.
>>
>> So honestly, I think it makes sense to first lay down this groundwork
>> before changing elements like the properties panels.  In the end, I
>> think that these two parts could be developed in parallel though.
>>
>> I plan on focusing on the core structure of u_main.tk then working on
>> the menus, key commands, window dressing and localization support.
>> Then when there is a nice structure to build upon, I really want to
>> focus on making the workflow as smooth as possible, like structuring
>> a lot of the ideas from DesireData.
>>
>> Another thing I think is really worth exploring is replacing tkcmd.c
>> with pure Tcl code.  Then the GUI would be pure Tcl and easier to
>> build and manage.  Plus this should make handling charsets much
>> smoother AFAIK for supporting non-ASCII chars.
>>
>>> Second, and this just occurred to me, I think it would be smart to
>>> separate
>>> the u_main.tk cide into several smaller files.  They could simply be
>>> concatenated by the makefile.  This way people could work on  
>>> different
>>> parts of it with much less chance of their work colliding.  I
>>> should have
>>> thought of this simple strategy years ago, hmm.
>>
>> I am not sure that this would have a big impact, but I wouldn't
>> oppose it.  Personally, I think the file should either be called
>> 'pd.tk' or should be broken up into Tcl 'packages' organized around
>> functionality.  PortAuthority is a Tcl app that is structured like
>> this (perhaps too much so, though).
>>
>> .hc
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> cheers
>>> Miller
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 05:32:59PM +0100, chun at goto10.org wrote:
>>>> Hi all:
>>>>
>>>> Hope you are all well:)
>>>>
>>>> Some of us have been toying with the idea of working on the gui  
>>>> code
>>>> (u_main.tk/pd.tk only, leaving the C code untouched) of Pd for a
>>>> little
>>>> while now. Starting with refactoring it and gradually adds new
>>>> stuff in,
>>>> and hopefully the changes will work its way to pd-vanilla.
>>>>
>>>> For this reason, we would like to revive the good old pd-devel  
>>>> as the
>>>> working branch. as it would seem fitting to do so instead of
>>>> making a new
>>>> branch with a new name.
>>>>
>>>> So i guess this mail will act as the announcement for this new
>>>> effort, as
>>>> well as a discussion starter for many of us who would like to talk
>>>> about
>>>> the surrounding issues. and perhaps we could also revive the semi
>>>> regular
>>>> dev meetings we had on #dataflow too;)
>>>>
>>>> cheers
>>>>
>>>> chun
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>> ---
>> ----
>>
>> If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
>>
>>
>>
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