Hello.

Does anybody know if these bugs are going to be fixed soon?

It's well known that GOP parameters can be changed with donecanvasdialog message but PureData doesn't respond well when this is done dynamically. It doesn't redraw the parent and leaves all kinds of graphical elements and connectors on the parent, as well as stops respecting GOP boundaries and draws stuff outside them. See example: DynamicGopTest.pd

Are these bugs expected to be fixed soon? I found a lot of discussions acknowledging that these bugs are present but I'm not sure if PureData developers are trying to fix them. To me this seems to be the biggest problem that's holding PD GUI development back.

@lzr Probably the best place to ask about these things would be in the mailing list, as that's the way to contact the developers.

And just a quick note: Pd-l2Ork on Linux passes tests 1, 4, 5 and 6.

@lzr Yes, it's not pretty.....
The remaining artifacts in test 6 I have always dealt with by auto-minimising and reopening the window.
Not satisfactory but....... in your patch this crashes pd on exit (win7 pd-0.43.4ext)

After digging though PureData sources I found a solution (a hack until this problem is fixed): any window (canvas) can be redrawn by sending this message to it:

[map 0, map 1(

This can be sent to pd-something or to canvas name previously set up with [namecanvas]. This is exactly how canvases are redrawn internally. "Map 0" removes all content from the window. "Map 1" puts all elements (objects, messages, comments, etc) back. This is done instantaneously, no blinking.

@lzr Cool! But if you expect this to be ever solved, it's better to bring the attention of the developers to the issue via the mailing list.

Thank you, @gsagostinho, I will try. I found a similar bug report in the bug tracker and added a comment there but there doesn't seem much activity there. I don't see many recent commits in PureData's code repository too. I wonder why.

Pd-extended isn't being developed, so bug reports there will likely never do anything. Pd vanilla on the other hand is always being developed. Recently someone wrote a plugin which automatically downloads and installs externals to vanilla, so I guess extended might become redundant very soon.

If you want to know whether those bugs will get fixed in Pd Vanilla, have a look at the name of the method you are using..

"donecanvasdialog" is a method that is designed to be triggered after the user has clicked "Ok" in the properties dialog for a canvas. (I.e., the canvas dialog is "done"). It wasn't designed to programmatically animate a complex UI, and the fact that everybody uses it to do that tells you clearly that Pd is missing some important functionality.

So if having a sensible API to do simple 2d graphical manipulations is so low a priority that everybody abuses an obscure method to build patches, you can imagine that fixing bugs with that obscure method is a low priority as well.

Luckily Ivica is a champ and has fixed most of this with Pd-l2ork. (And it isn't an accident that my data structure improvements which make these kinds of UIs much easier exist only in Pd-l2ork, too.)

Here's an experiment: send a bug report to both the Pd mailing list and the Pd-l2ork mailing list, and see which one gets fixed first. (But do make sure the bug actually exists in Pd-l2ork first.)

Luckily Ivica is a champ and has fixed most of this with Pd-l2ork

He is indeed a fantastic guy, all my bug reports got fast answers and fast solutions.

@gsagostinho said:

Pd-extended isn't being developed, so bug reports there will likely never do anything. Pd vanilla on the other hand is always being developed. Recently someone wrote a plugin which automatically downloads and installs externals to vanilla, so I guess extended might become redundant very soon.

Ah, interessting.
Can you tell the name of that plugin or where to find it?

@bang I think it's called Deken, it was mentioned in the mailing list and it has a GitHub repository. I haven't tried it myself, but people were very enthusiastic about it.

@gsagostinho said:

@bang I think it's called Deken, it was mentioned in the mailing list and it has a GitHub repository. I haven't tried it myself, but people were very enthusiastic about it.

EDIT: here is the link https://github.com/pure-data/deken

@gsagostinho said:

@gsagostinho said:

@bang I think it's called Deken, it was mentioned in the mailing list and it has a GitHub repository. I haven't tried it myself, but people were very enthusiastic about it.

EDIT: here is the link https://github.com/pure-data/deken

Thank you, very nice!

I switched to vanilla and tried Deken. It's nice but doesn't sound like a complete solution yet.

It downloads all libraries into a directory but it doesn't add each library's subdirectory into the search path. So you need to add each one manually.

Also I found no way to see a list of all available libraries. You need to know exactly what to enter in the search box (it also means that the problem of not knowing what library to install when you see a "couldn't create" error is still gonna be a problem, unless people start using fully qualified object names everywhere). There's also currently no way of installing multiple libraries at once (for example, "everything from pd-extended").

Still better than using software that's not maintained though, so thanks for your advice!

@lzr

It's nice but doesn't sound like a complete solution yet.

I agree with you, but I would make so much emphasis on that yet. This is really the way to go IMO, and the day we can easily (or even automatically!) install libraries and externals on vanilla is the day pd-extended can be finally put to rest.

Deken is indeed a great plug-in, the thing is that only few developers have included their libraries to its repository, because it's still quite alpha. Maybe in the future it will contain the list of available libraries you mention.
Another easy way to use external in vanilla, is copy them from the "extra" folder of extended to another folder (on OS X it could be /Library/Pd) and then set the search path of vanilla to look at that place. You won't need to compile anything this way.

Another easy way to use external in vanilla, is copy them from the "extra" folder of extended

That's what I did on Linux some time ago and my vanilla become amazing