[PD] "list foreach"?

[Chris McCormick]

On 10/10/14 12:29, Jonathan Wilkes via Pd-list wrote:
> Oh, I almost forgot-- when I suggested I'd try dev'ing it in Pd-l2ork, I
> was actually _dissuaded_ from doing development, for fear of creating an
> incompatibility.

Yep, noted. Seems pretty crazy from your perspective, right? I think I
understand why, and I would like to hear your thoughts on why two people
would dissuade you from doing the development of "list foreach" in
Pd-l2ork. What was their motivation?

> Can you explain how to turn this community ethos into the one you
> imagine in your general outline-- one where we can quickly and
> effectively implement badly needed features like infinite undo and many
> others which already exist in Pd-l2ork?

Infinite-undo is particularly hairy, so that's a good edge-case to examine.

We have seen a change as large and unweildy (maybe even larger and
unweildy-er) as infinite-undo go into Miller's version of Pd before.
Hans' tcl/GUI refactor work was large and disruptive and changed the
codebase in many places. So how did Hans manage to get it into Pd? Well,
I asked him that a while back, and if memory serves it was a months long
effort continuously submitting small patches against Pd HEAD and
emailing Miller directly and politely to advocate for those patches.
(ref: `git log --author hans`) As painful as that sounds, it is the
customary way to get code into most Free Software projects, and more
importantly, it was what worked. I am infinitely thankful to Hans that
he took the time to do that work and submit it correctly because we all
get a better piece of software for it.

I am also of course infinitely thankful to Miller for creating such a
gigantic and amazing work and letting us jerks at it with no strings
attached. Can we really ask more of a person?

Most changes to Pd are not going to be as large and hairy as infinite
undo, or gui refactors. Most changes are little things and those ones
are ripe for improving our process. I humbly submit that what I
outlined, for most smaller changes, will get more code into Pd than
other processes.

You may or may not be interested in that, and that is your prerogative.

Cheers,

Chris.

-- 
http://mccormick.cx/