[PD] [PD-announce] more objects: passwd utils

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jun 13, 2006, at 6:37 AM, Marc Lavallée wrote:

> Le 12 Juin 2006 16:55, Hans-Christoph Steiner a écrit :
>> Call me crazy, but I just made some objects so that you can get the
>> info from /etc/passwd and /etc/group, and convert between UIDs/GIDs
>> and usernames/groupnames.  Its part of my effort to provide as many
>> low level primitives within Pd as possible.  Or really, its make a
>> libc interface for Pd.
>
> Hans, why are you crazy about low level primitives? ;-) Why not  
> promoting
> the use of the shell or the python externals to interact with the  
> system?
> I'm not against your idea (maybe I don't understand it), but is it  
> worth
> it? I'd rather use common Unix scripting commands than depend on  
> more pd
> externals (and more help patches).

[shell] doesn't work on Windows and [py] has crashing issues and  
doesn't necessarily work easily on Windows.  Plus I've never used  
python, and don't really want to learn any new languages right now (I  
know enough, its time to get some work done!).

And since Pd is already written in C, it makes sense to write the  
primitives in C so there are less dependencies.  You are of course  
free to use UNIX scripting commands, so I am guessing these objects  
are not for you.  But many Pd programmers don't know python or UNIX  
scripting, so why should Pd programmers have to learn another  
language in order to do basic things?  That's like telling python  
programmers they should just use the UNIX scripting or C.

.hc

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