[PD] messing with help-patches

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Roman Haefeli hat gesagt: // Roman Haefeli wrote:

> - what is the 'offical' (non-deprecated) naming-scheme for help-patches:
> help-<name>.pd, <name>-help.pd or just <name>.pd (the last seems not to
> work, but i found some helppatches named after this scheme)
> since pd's own helppatches are named after <name>-help.pd, i assume this
> the 'official' one.

It was agreed that <name>-help.pd is preferred scheme. This way you
still get a kind of alphabetic order instead of all files starting
with "help-" and you could in priciple use the keyboard to navigate a
help browser (worked with the old one, but doesn't work with the one
currently called help browser).

> - where are they supposed to be?
> i found helppatches in the following locations (i didn't place them by
> myself, they all have been put there by their installers)
>  * pd/extra/
>  * pd/extra/<lib>/
>  * pd/doc/5.reference/
>  * pd/doc/5.reference/<lib>/
>  * pd/doc/<lib>/
>  * pd/doc/<lib>/<blablablabl>/<blablabl>/
>^ 
> since the helppatches cannot be reached from the helpbrowser, when they
> are located in pd/extra, 

This must be another bug of the help browser: It doesn't seem to care
about user-settings regarding -help-path.

> i'd say this is not the way to go. it's handy
> to have an overview of all objects of a certain lib. also would it be
> nice to have the helppatches of the libs separated from pd's own
> helppatches. 

I don't think the location of the help-patches should be used to get
an overview of the objects in a library. There is no direct connection
between these two attributes, it would be artificial and error prone
to create one IMO. Still for making installation and packaging easier,
subdirs for every library have advantages.

> from the users point of view the following points would make life easy:
> 
> -all helppatches are named after <name>-help.pd, which makes browsing
> easier

Yes, definitely

> - pd's own helppatches are located in pd/doc/5.reference (as it is now)

Good.

> - helppatches of the libs are located in pd/doc/5.refernece/<lib>

Possible. pd-extended generally works that way IIR. However you need
to use pd-extended's "-libdir" extension (or is this already in 0.40)
to make it work when using directory prefixes.

> the only problem i see here, is that one has to add an extra -helppath
> for each lib. it would be nice, if that could be avoided by searching
> pd/doc/5.reference recursively.

No, this would break a lot of things, especially directory prefixed
names like [maxlib/scale].

For my abstractions I like to keep it simple and I just place the help
patches next to the original abstractions. This way I directly see
which abstraction are still without help-patch. For "installing" these
patches I think, the libdir approach makes the most sense. 

NB: I think, we should not try to organize the file layout by looking
at the current help browser. IMO the browser has a broken design,
because it's just a filebrowser limited to a certain directory, and
it's a worse filebrowser than the builtin Tk filebrowser was. A real
help browser should look different anyways. What I have seen in
DesireData is going in the right direction IMO, but it's a radical
change, os don't hold your breath.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__