[PD] Why I don't like the new automagic

[Andy Farnell]

I remember you explaining this before Mathieu, and it was with
great dismay that I realised DesireData was not to be an
alternative to pd-gui, but a complete rewrite of the whole show.

It seems there is a necessary intermediate step by which
Pd is properly separated into two truly independent GUI client
and sound server code sets.

>From this position, it opens the door to all kinds of 
alternative GUIs, so long as clear protocols are established
for exchange between pd and pd-gui. 






On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 15:50:24 -0500 (EST)
Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:

> On Tue, 27 Jan 2009, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> > I think there is a ton of potential to the ideas in desiredata and 
> > things like the new editing tricks in pd-vanilla 0.42.  But they also 
> > have the large potential to cause harm to peoples' workflow.
> 
> In desiredata, the workflow is almost completely backwards-compatible and 
> pretty much everything new is made of new keyboard shortcuts that don't 
> exist in pd. It should be noted that the new automagic is Miller's 
> innovation whereas desiredata put this feature on Ctrl+6 as a proof of 
> concept.
> 
> > This is a central reason why I am involved in rewriting the GUI from 
> > scratch for pd-devel.  I want to make Pd's GUI easy to modify and 
> > extend.
> 
> The GUI is not solely u_main.tk ... even after removing t_tkcmd.c. Plenty 
> of C code is part of the GUI... look at most of the sys_vgui commands: 
> they don't let the client figure out things on its own; they make 
> decisions about the appearance. After all, the g_*.c files are not called 
> "g" for nothing: the "g" stands for graphical or gui.
> 
> And the problem with rewriting anything from scratch is that the bigger it 
> is, the longer it is before you have something working properly again, and 
> it's even worse when there's not even a list of features that can tell you 
> what has to be still supported and what's just an artifact of how it's 
> implemented. Pd users have come to depend on the strangest of features. I 
> always thought that gui objects could be made opaque, but in the end, I 
> can't even do that without breaking someone's patches, and then, I can't 
> even change the priority of those gui objects: the object behind has to be 
> the one receiving the clicks! if I change that, it also breaks someone's 
> patches. This is just two examples out of 666.
> 
>   _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec


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