Greetings again, Kassen and Steve! First of all, huge thank you's for all you've done for ChucK and friends!
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.
This is a great point. We haven't been using this list as much as would be helpful. Things have certainly been a bit crazy for everyone these last few months. I just got back from ICMC in Belfast, and a week before that Beijing. Others have had fairly crazy schedules as well.
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.
We need an update on the documentation for the new UAnae in ChucK. Flip and pilF are meant to flip and unflip audio sample streams into vectors that work at the UAna level. We have a few more UAnae to add before this becomes useful. Apologies for the confusion and lack of explanation!
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.
Hear hear! I agree with all of this. At the moment, I honestly don't know how to effectively fix this, but please know that I genuinely want to. Feedback in this forum, despite lack of responses from me, have been extremely helpful. We'll need to come up with ways to submit patches, doc's, examples, etc... Working on it, though slowly!
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.
Kassen, you rock! And as disarrayed as parts of the dev pipeline is, I am genuinely grateful for the ChucKist "culture" that we've all helped to build. The suggestions and criticisms are totally constructive, and even though we are often slow in fixing things, please know that we are deeply thankful for it all. Yours, Ge!