[PD-dev] More gui-rewrite: Re: Pd-extended EOL?

[Kaj Ailomaa]

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016, at 08:30 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> Hi Kaj,In the GUI port of Pd-l2ork I have about 18 sys_vgui calls left to
> revise.  At that point the tcl strings will be completely removed from
> the core of Pd-l2ork.
> In practice, it's not really a process of changing tcl calls to pd
> message calls.  Tcl strings are more expressive than pd messages-- they
> allow you to specify arbitrary strings (e.g., the string may have spaces
> inside it) and (nested) lists of values.  Since the current code relies
> on those two features to communicate with the GUI, porting everything to
> a less expressive message format is a really bad idea.  You'll either end
> up jumping through hoops to deal with all the edge cases, or coming up
> with your own syntax for strings containing arbitrary characters and
> list/array boundaries (at which they are no longer Pd messages).
> I used pd_vmess as a model and just parameterized the messages to the
> GUI.  That means I have only a handful of functions in one place where I
> can choose exactly how the commands look when they get sent over the
> wire.  That way even if I chose the worst possible design, fixing it is
> just a matter of changing the guts of those few functions instead of
> having to refactor every single call to the gui throughout all of the
> core.
> -Jonathan
>  
> 

Wow. Been a while since I tried pd-l2ork. A little tough to install on
anything except Ubuntu. The deb installer has build dependencies as
regular dependencies, and on Debian I was unable to install all of them,
so I had to force it.

The gui is really quick and responsive. And, I noticed the gui coloring
is all configurable. Pretty scrollbars, a html like help browser, etc.
The whole thing seems to be based on -extended, which is what I used for
many years - mostly because of the look, and initbang(while I hadn't
worked out other solutions yet).

I'll put some time in studying the code, as there seems to be some clues
to the problems there (both in how they are solved, and why they are not
solved that way in vanilla - I'm assuming). I'll resurface once I have
something new to add :).

Thanks Jonathan!