On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Kassen
2008/8/29 Stephen Sinclair
But I'm currently a bit confused whether the ChucK devs actually read and use this list, since there is obviously work being done on ChucK but I see no information about it, and no one responded to my patch. If not, I'm just wondering if there's a more appropriate place to discuss ChucK development or to at least submit patches.
I agree that more communication on this level would be preferable. Another example is that we now have some Uanae (Flip and pilF and some more stuff) that I have no idea at all about what they do, how or why, I'm not sure how I could figure this out, short of diging in the source and reading up on whatever phenomenon they deal with. The examples that use them turn a sine into a the same sine so clearly they are relective but beyond that I don't get it. I pointed this out on the main list yet did not yet get a reply.
Now, I realise that my friend Ge is a very busy man and may lack the time to send as many mails as he'd like. He has ChucK to maintain, students to teach to, workshops to give, a partner and who knows how much more. I have been and still am very outspoken in my respect for him and his generosity in sharing ChucK with us all.
Still, it's my suspicion that if more time would be spend on open communication then that would make it easier to share the work (not just coding but also documentation, finding bugs and documenting them, answering questions, etc, etc, etc), thus decreasing the load on some individuals. Right now I am contributing a bit but I could do more (and have fun doing it) if we could improve comunication. I'd be happy to try my hand at fixing Sitar, for example, but it's not at all clear to me how Sitar should deal with very low notes (clearly not by outputting text warnings at sample-rate, which is the current behaviour). I'd also be happy to help write the manual but it's not at all clear to me in what form I should donate paragraphs or small sections.
Actually you might find that a good place to discuss the Sitar model is on the STK mailing list, which is where it comes from.
Perhaps this need not be said again but I'd like to stress that this is not meant as critisism and should merely be seen as my attempt to help think about how we could improve ChucK and ChucKist culture.
Thanks Kas, I want to be clear that I share the same sentiment. Sorry if I come off being utilitarian in my communications sometimes, but I am usually just trying to be efficient. Obviously I think ChucK is a really cool idea and totally respect Ge for making it happen. But yes, I would love some communication and perhaps slightly more informative commit comments sometimes, too. ;-) I want to avoid situations where two people end up trying to solve the same problem, for example, stepping on each other's toes. For example, right now I have no idea, someone at Princeton or Stanford could already be working hard on the 64-bit problem and is totally annoyed by my patch, but I have no way of knowing this. I respect the idea of working on a product and simply pounding away at it until it works well, but I think a large reason for the success for projects like Pd is that it has fairly easy-to-understand code and everyone *talks* a lot while working on things. Making things easy and friendly to developers can only help a project go places faster. I'm actually fine with the idea of Ge not wanting to work with a larger base of developers, I'm okay with that, but the main reason I keep persisting is that he's said himself that he is interested in contributions. e.g., https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck-users/2008-April/002762.html Anyways, I'll just sit tight until I get some kind of answer. ;-) Steve