[PD] class_sethelpsymbol (was: [folder] external?)

Bryan Jurish jurish at uni-potsdam.de
Fri Jun 25 23:51:40 CEST 2010


morning all,

On 2010-06-25 20:43:38, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at> appears
to have written:
> I'm not aware of the rules that you are talking about.

huh?!

I clearly and distinctly recall that you (Hans) mentioned to me off-list
in 2008 that use of class_sethelpsymbol() was deprecated for pd-extended
("it is best not to use class_sethelpsymbol() at all" [for pd-extended])
and recommended that I remove those calls from my code (to be fair, you
offered to make the required changes yourself to the external which
brought my use of class_sethelpsymbol() to your attention).  I know that
I added a few #ifdefs to some of my own externals in order to avoid
those calls (and others) for pd-extended builds.  I assume that the
"changed rules" to which Yves refers in this context are simply the
deprecation/breaking of class_sethelpsymbol() for pd-extended, versus
its fully functional public-API status in pd-vanilla (@Yves: feel free
to correct me if I'm mistaken here).

> One thing I do
> know is that you don't need to use class_sethelpsymbol() for a object
> called [playlist] unless the help patch is called something other than
> playlist-help.pd.
> So for 'unauthorized', all of the help patches are named after the
> objects, so class_sethelpsymbol() is unneeded and redundant.

Indeed.  The same holds (these days) for 'moocow'.  I still feel that
this discussion is relevant, though.

im(ns)ho, the problem is not so much a matter of the "official" (read
"conventional") help-file naming scheme, but rather help files for class
aliases (i.e. class-names allocated by class_addcreator(), which is also
deprecated / broken in pd-extended), and external "families" (e.g.
[any2bytes], [bytes2any], [any2wchars], [wchars2any]): any case in which
multiple classes can/should/must share a single intuitive help patch.
Such shared help patches however must be needlessly duplicated (e.g.
copied on install) to conform with a strict conventional help-file
naming scheme as apparently (formerly?) required by pd-extended, which I
find inelegant as a programmer and a pain in the wahooni as an external
maintainer.  Don't get me started on multi-object libraries... just my
€0.02 ...

marmosets,
  Bryan

ps - just to add yet another method for reading directory contents to
the ever-growing list attached to the original (wobbling) thread:
there's also [readdir], which gives you some filesystem information too
(or perhaps [moocow/readdir] for pd-extended; I don't really know since
I use pd-vanilla for reasons which may or may not be apparent)...

> On Jun 24, 2010, at 10:44 PM, ydegoyon at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> yeh, exactly...
>>
>> but as people change rules about help files without prior notice,
>> i'm just bored of handling that kind of issue
>>
>> the initial idea of sethelpsymbol was that you could put as help file :
>> comment-peigner.la.giraffe.pd as help file and
>> nobody would have bothered you for that...
>> but freedom is gone .... with obscure rules...
>>
>> ciao,
>> sevy
>>
>> Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>>> Oh, I thought I was using a nightly build but I wasn't.  If I add
>>> "playlist-help.pd" to extra/unauthorized I see it finds it just fine.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Jonathan
>>>
>>> --- On *Thu, 6/24/10, ydegoyon at gmail.com /<ydegoyon at gmail.com>/* wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>    From: ydegoyon at gmail.com <ydegoyon at gmail.com>
>>>    Subject: Re: [PD] [folder] external?
>>>    To: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>
>>>    Cc: "Kim Cascone" <kim at anechoicmedia.com>, "pd-list" <pd-list at iem.at>
>>>    Date: Thursday, June 24, 2010, 11:28 PM
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>    the problem is absolutely not that,
>>>    this is perfectly correct..
>>>
>>>    problem is that playlist-help.pd is not included in pd-extended ..
>>>
>>>    Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>>>    > A different issue:
>>>    >
>>>    > Line 1019 of playlist.c:
>>>    > class_sethelpsymbol(playlist_class, gensym("playlist.pd"));
>>>    >
>>>    > But the help patch is "playlist-help.pd," so pd apologizes:
>>>    > sorry, couldn't find help patch for "playlist.pd"
>>>    >
>>>    > -Jonathan

-- 
Bryan Jurish                       "There is *always* one more bug."
jurish at uni-potsdam.de       -Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology



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