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

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Andy Farnell wrote:

> 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.

Well it was way too late to realise that, I rewrote much of the C code of 
IEMGUI back in the spring of 2004. DesireData didn't really start in 
mid-2005, it was a revival of an older project.

> 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.

Well, it may look like that when you don't mess with the code, but I ask 
you to ask yourself: what kind of protocol will that be between the client 
and the server? If you don't touch the server at all, you will have to 
have clients that accept to be told things in the words that the server is 
willing to feed them. Would all the clients have to accept Tcl commands 
from the server, and furthermore, would they all have to accept the same 
details that the server usually feeds to the client, such as how to draw 
each piece of each gui object on the canvas?... and that's just the 
display; the keyboard/mouse is similarly handled much more 
by the server than by the client.

And then, how many client programmes do you expect? I don't think that 
it'd take long before people realise that they don't even want two clients 
for the same server... and if it's the server that handles most of the 
things that people could be interested in making differently, then what 
does it buy you to have multiple client programmes?

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec