[PD] messing with help-patches

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Aug 21, 2006, at 8:48 AM, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> 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.

The Help Browser is just a file browser of pd/doc/.  It doesn't read - 
help-path.  But the grand PDDP plan has this specified.  Anyone want  
to implement it?

http://puredata.org/dev/pddp/


>> 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.

It would make sense to have the help patches sorted by lib if the  
libs were actually coherent units, like in Java, C++, libc, etc.  A  
search functionality would be a better way to search for objects.   
This is also spec'ed in the PDDP spec.

>> 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.

Or just add them to the helppath.  That's all the libdir extension  
does.  I need to find some time to make the libdir stuff a proper  
loader, using Thomas' loader functionality, then I'll submit it to  
Miller.

>> 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].

Actually, this is exactly what the libdir code does, and AFAIK, it  
doesn't break things.

>
> 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.

The current help browser was meant to be a temporary hack.  Anyone  
want to write the replacement?

.hc

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