[PD] [PD-announce] the end of type restrictions

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sun Jul 22 22:49:36 CEST 2007


On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Andy Farnell wrote:

> Will I still be able to install the DesireData interface and use
> it with Pd?

You can't use that user interface with Miller's pd because Miller's pd 
does not offer the functionality required so that this user interface can 
be implemented.

I've never said that you could use DesireData "with Pd" - e.g. you can't 
put pieces of Miller's 0.41 and DesireData together and expect it to work 
at all. It's *always* been like that.

> I've always seen it as a smart move, taking advantage of Millers 
> forsight in designing Pd as a client-server architecture and using that 
> decoupling to improve the interface.

DesireData's client-server architecture has rather little to do 
with Miller's. I had to reinvent almost all of it. Basically, I can't see 
DesireData as "taking advantage" of that. The client-server design I use 
is much like jMax's, but transplanted into a Pd/Tcl context.

You have to understand it this way: if Pd had been a single-process 
program, it wouldn't have been any more difficult to turn it into 
DesireData. I mean that there's hardly any decoupling in Miller's Pd.

> I don't even understand why anyone is talking about changing object 
> behaviours, those are part of the server/engine not the interface 
> surely?

DesireData isn't just about the user interface.

> Is DesireData heading in the direction of being a completely different 
> piece of software incompatible with PureData?

You could drop the sensationalistic language, and actually think about 
what constitutes incompatibility, and why, and how much, and what you'd 
get in return, and whether each change is a nice tradeoff or not.

> Why are these great new objects like [tracecall] that Mathieu is
> building not being added to Pd?

Because they can't. They lack the supporting internal parts. The 
server/engine of DesireData has been modified so that [tracecall] becomes 
possible. If you compile [tracecall] as an external, you get: undefined 
symbol: pd_stack.

You can't have [unpost] either, because when I introduced the Pd Console 
in early 2004, Miller rewrote it so that it doesn't use the sys_printhook 
feature, because Miller did not want the sys_printhook feature. This is 
the only essential difference that I can find between Miller's rewrite of 
the Pd Console and the original Pd Console. This is what he considered to 
be a "cleaner reimplementation" of the Pd Console. Now this sys_printhook 
feature is exactly what [unpost] needs in order to be possible. If you 
compile [unpost] as an external, you get: undefined symbol: sys_printhook.

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal QC Canada


More information about the Pd-list mailing list