[PD] multiple instances of a patch forbidden in 0.49, why?

[katja]

Sorry for reporting this so late in the test phase. One thing that
surprises me is, why would it be considered an accident to open more
than one instance of the same patch? This depends on the purpose of a
patch or project. For the audio test it makes no sense indeed to open
more than one. On the other hand, uses cases for multiple instances
are innumerable, for live performance, analysis, and who knows what
else. A patch is a tool and no one can tell how people use it. I would
rather say that unintentionally loading the same patch twice is a
mistake, but not one that pd must take care of by prohibiting it. A
popup warning or the like would be annoying enough in my view. Not
sure what would be a good solution. Frankly I'm just perplexed that
this protective behavior came up in pd.

Katja


On 9/22/18, Miller Puckette <msp at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> Oh dear, I was worried this might cause problems.
>
> The rationale is that, especially for beginning users but often for
> experienced ones, it is rarely desirable to have two copies of, for
> instance, the test tone patch running at once.  (An example from my own
> usage is that I have a "play" shell command that opens a patch to play
> a soundfile but I don't want to spawn a new one every time I want to play
> a new file.)
>
> Anyhow, to make the old behavior possible (which I think is only useful for
> experts) I could imagine a couple of ways:
>
> 1) ugly workaround, make symlinks to the same patch so it can be opened
> (and then managed) via different filenames or directory names)
>
> 2) I could add a message to pd or perhaps a startup flag, or both, to
> switch the behavior on and off.
>
> 3) (I doubt this is a good idea) I could make it "0.48 compatible" to open
> duplicates.
>
> Which do you think is the better option?  Any of these would be easy for me
> to accomodate.
>
> cheers
> Miller
>
> On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 03:17:20PM +0200, katja wrote:
>> Much to my alarm, Pd 0.49test3 prevents loading multiple instances of
>> a patch, and release notes tell us that this is on purpose. Moreover,
>> when trying to load a patch twice, pd becomes unresponsive in some
>> cases.
>>
>> The new behavior is a show stopper for projects that rely on, or
>> benefit from, loading multiple instances from a patch. As it happens
>> I'm currently working on such a project. So my questions are: what is
>> the rationale behind this 'feature', and is it really going to stay?
>>
>> Katja
>>
>>
>>
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