[PD] puredatabase

[robbert van hulzen]

No, I didn't forget... But the discussion (eg Pluggo4PD) is getting to a
point where I think "wow, interesting!" rather than "I can help here."

Here's a few thoughts anyway. More to show what goes on in the mind of
someone who's just getting into the construction of the telescope after a
bit of star gazing.

All this (incl below) said, I'd still love to help out in some way, by eg
cleaning up / clarifying help patches, eg with some help from the developer.


When first starting to use pd, I attempted to make a manual for myself,
starting out with listing all the objects (internals, then) with
descriptions. When getting deeper into pd, I abandoned that idea because I
preferred to spend my time on learning by doing. Still, a readable list of
what-does-what would be welcome, and would have been then.

As a sidenote: a glossary of computer related terms would also have been
helpful. By now i know what a subroutine is, but a year ago the first
sentence of the template1-about.pd (at
http://puredata.org/dev/pddp/template1-about.pd/view) would've already
puzzled me, just like the term "metadata" does now. I can guess what it
means, I can find some info, there's a wiki, but I think when you just get
into pd there's a lot to deal with, so you don't necessarily want to get
into even more. Mind you: I'm not saying everybody should be able to use pd
with no effort. Of course this is an app you must want to use and be willing
to dive into, I just mean that sometimes knowledge is taken for granted that
not necessarily everyone jumping into pd has.
Maybe this is not pd's responsability, I'm just mentioning what was / is
troublesome for me.

padawan12 <padawan12 at obiwannabe.co.uk>wrote:


> 
> Yes. At the risk of building a whole content management system (is
> puredatabase still built on Zope/Plone?) this seems the sensible format.
> At some point I would like to move some tutorials I've made onto the system.
> These are mainly HTML with diagrams and links to patches and sounds. A really
> thorough system would allow this and make it easy.
> 
> But, from a development POV might I suggest that this is ambitious and one
> would be best to concentrate on just getting it to work right with .pd files
> to begin with, then add the bells and whistles to allow richer content. But
> being mindful of future content types cant hurt.
> 
> One interesting and challenging enough problem that already exists is how to
> make sure that help/tutorial/exmaple patches that depend on certain
> abstractions and externals will always load.
> 
> This is a dependency issue not dissimilar to the pakage management needed
> in something like the Debian apt repository system. It may be possible
> to tag each resource with its minimum version and libraries needed, or it
> might be better to hold multiple verions of the same resource and be able
> to browse by platform and current Pd version.
> 
> The way I see it, Puredatabase is not just there to organise and structure
> documentation, it is there to make maintainance as easy as possible. We have
> an ongoing struggle to keep helpfiles up to date. One of the views, for
> maintainers, should reflect those needs. It should be easy enough to use
> so that anyone who spots an error or omission can quickly log in and make
> changes Wiki style.
> 
> Hope I'm not just prattling on about issues you've already considered.
>