[PD] finding objects ?

[Simon Wise]

>>>   I can update vcf~ in the PDDP docs at some point, but aside from that what
>>>   do you have in mind?
>>
>> Multi-dimensional indexing whose data can be easily referenced by multiple
>> features (object search, auto-completion, maybe other)
>>
>
> How will multiple dimensions help users find something that isn't there?

exactly ... to find details of what is on your machine depends on how 
consistently those things you happen to have installed are documented ... and 
some people are making efforts to document a subset of what is available 
consistently, but even covering just what is in the extended archives is a huge, 
never ending job.

to find what is available on the www you need to rely on google or similar, this 
list, the wiki etc ... depending where the author has mentioned it ... and 
details and documentation will never be consistent, so indexing that usefully is 
difficult.

An effort to package a collection of useful objects in a consistent and indexed 
way has been happening in the debian repositories ... even if you don't use 
debian or one of its derivatives (even if you don't use linux) this is a useful, 
consistent resource with the sources, dependency information, descriptions and 
various interfaces and indexes for searching it, mirrored on fast mirrors all 
over the place, archived, built and tested (for linux) on lots of architectures 
and against lots of other software. That infrastructure would be impossible to 
maintain for Pd alone.

Simon