[PD] help needed: "conditional" help patches

[Christof Ressi]

> On 12/11/23 15:29, Christof Ressi wrote:
>> Ok, I have a come up with the following solution: I moved the 
>> multichannel section into a dedicated patch and open it with [;pd 
>> open <name> <dir> 1( when the user clicks a bang button in the main 
>> help patch. It's not perfect, but kind of works for my purposes.
>
> so the user only gets the error if they click on the bang?
> hmm.
Yes, it is not perfect. This could be avoided, if Pd had a way to query 
the version at runtime (see 
https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/issues/928). I thought about 
adding a (private) message to the AOO objects that returns the actual Pd 
version via sys_getversion(), but this seems a bit overkill.
>
> - personally i wouldn't care to much about error messages in help 
> patches (as in: going through hoops in order to avoid them). 
I do...
> since in this case you control the actual error message make sure that 
> it is friendly enough (e.g. just telling people that they will need a 
> newer version of Pd in order to use this cool feature) - i strongly 
> believe that we can expect people to actually read and understand an 
> error message (and not just seek help just because "lines were red"). 
> it's not that Pd's error messages are very obtrusive)

The error message itself is friendly, but in this case the user did 
nothing wrong - they just opened a help patch! - so I would *really* 
like to avoid them.

> you could create two help patches and in the multichannel version 
> *only* document the multichannel features and include the 
> non-multichannel help patch as an ordinary object (probably with some 
> "auto open" code. that way you wouldn't have to duplicate the common 
> documentation. 

Interesting. The big disadvantage is that the roles are reversed: what 
should be a subpatch is now the root window, so when the user tries to 
close it, it closes the whole help patch... So I guess I'd rather prefer 
my current solution.

But thanks for your input!

Christof
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