Re: [LAD] How to develop guis for LV2?

On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 21:46 +0200, Nedko Arnaudov wrote:
> David Robillard <dave@email-addr-hidden> writes:
>
> > New idea: it is tempting to define a very simple turtle document format
> > for hosts to signify what they support, then this kind of compatibility
> > information could be automatically generated as well (and in a much more
> > useful form than a human could put together). The information is
> > already there for plugins. As far as I'm concerned the lack of
> > automatically generated documentation (and/or machine readable data in
> > general) is pretty much the sole reason for every single complaint
> > related to this whole thing. This way is also decentralized, but the
> > results for all "known" implementations could be hosted at lv2plug.in
> > (or anywhere else) for convenience.
> >
> > I am surprised I didn't think of this before, but it seems to be a
> > pretty good idea. All that is needed as far as maintenance goes is for
> > hosts to supply a simple turtle document that says "I implement foo and
> > bar and baz extensions". The rest can be compiled into whatever fancy
> > human readable form you want, for every single plugin out there, by a
> > tool. If I provide a template, would anyone be willing to put together
> > these documents? I will gladly write the tool if the data is there, and
> > the problem will be solved, and a convention set that solves it in the
> > future with basically no effort involved.
>
> I've been thinking about this for a while and IMHO, it is best to put it
> in the DOAP. OTOH, when things change they do change.

Mosts hosts don't even have RDF metadata. DOAP is just one vocabulary,
I agree it should be shipped with hosts though, and all data should
probably be in the same document (doap stuff, supported extensions,
whatever else). This would be a good precedent to set.

> And what user
> really cares is whether plugin and host are compatible in the versions
> that are supplied by their distro.

This is another reason for automatically generating it. Considering all
the versions, and all the permutations of hosts/plugins, doing it as a
human maintained static set of documents isn't really feasible.

> >> IMHO, the two basic questions that user will have are:
> >>
> >> 1. Will the plugin X that I use a lot work on host Y that I want to try?
> >> 2. Will the host W that I use a lot work well with the plugin Z I've found?
> >
> > 3. How "well supported" is this extension, and should I use it in my new
> > plugin?
> >
> > This question needs an overview. Even if plugin and host authors supply
> > this information, an overview is useful.
>
> This is where user comments come. Some distros can assign comments to
> packages, I've seen this in Arch, when I tried it recently.

The point is that having this stuff scattered all over the place doesn't
really solve the problem. We need to establish a standard format for
this data, gather the data (in a distro-agnostic format (RDF)), write
the tools, and get it done. People can package the results and
integrate it with whatever other things as they please.

Integration with packaging systems might be nice (for people that use
those distros) but doesn't solve the problem. First thing's first and
all that.

-dr

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Received on Mon Nov 9 00:15:09 2009