[PD] saving state of a patch

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Mon Jul 21 21:46:33 CEST 2008


Hallo,
Atte André Jensen hat gesagt: // Atte André Jensen wrote:

> Ok, thanks for all the advice, I'll look at sssad, then.
> 
> First problem: It seems it's there, but broken (is it my that's broken?):

Pd-extended is broken in that it cannot load abstractions that are in
directories which have the same name as the abstraction. At least
that's how I understand the problem. Users of upstream Pd like me
aren't affected.

> However google suggested that I should create [sssad/sssad], 

Don't believe google: the official name for [sssad] is [sssad]. 

But see below.

> and that worked. Unfortunately right-clicking->help totally freezes
> up my system (something that never happens). What's up with that? Is
> that just a single bug (so "don't click here") or a symptom of
> something bad?

Maybe it's the same issue of pd-extended that makes it fail to load
[sssad]? I have no idea.

> Additional question: I never saw the slash in objects (like in 
> [sssad/ssad]) before, it that some kind of namespace thing? Where can I 
> read more on that, including pros/cons and recommended ways/conventions?

Can of worms here, you may want to read up in the archives. 

Basically it's like this: If your -path setting points to "somedir"
and there is a directory "test" in it like "somedir/test", then you
can load an abstration "myabs.pd" in "test" like this: 

 [test/myabs]

This use of directory prefixes as a primitive namespace replacement is
tricky, however. For one, you also have to set the -helppath to
"somedir", if you want to let Pd find the test/myabs-help.pd file in.
This helpfile next to myabs.pd can use [myabs] directly, without
prefix. 

But if you put the helpfile somewhere else, say into /doc/5.reference,
then it won't find [myabs]  without directory prefix anymore, so it
has to use [test/myabs]. But if it uses [test/myabs] it won't work
anymore if you copy myabs.pd and myabs-help.pd directly into your
-path or into some other directory with a different name than "test"!

Directory prefixes can make things messy, if you want to just copy
abstractions around, e.g. to make self-contained packages or use
project directories with everthing included. 

Pd-extended installs sssad.pd into extra/sssad/sssad.pd and as "extra"
is in your pd-path, you can create [sssad/sssad] in pd-extended as
well as [sssad] - or you used to until something broke. I was never
fond of the additional and redundant "sssad/sssad", but I'm all for
freedom of choice so people may do whatever they like. But the
official name as far as I'm concerned is [sssad].

As a workaround you can move the content of extra/sssad into the
"extra" directory or another directory of your Pd-path.

E.g. if you have a checkout of the Pd subversion trunk in "PDSVN", you
can use this in your .pdrc:

 -path PDSVN/trunk/abstractions/footils/sssad/

to always load the "trunk" version of sssad.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                                     _ ______footils.org__




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