On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Mathieu Bouchard <mat...@artengine.ca> wrote:

Haha, as much as I would enjoy this...

Do you or Marius have any concrete suggestions as to what wold be a better approach? You must at least admit things could be better, no?

I just took a look at Max/MSP and they have a nice tagging system, as well as an excellent configurable filter on their file browser that ends up being a pretty elegant solution to many of these problems. Perhaps going the route of adding parsable tags to object help patches (e.g. a comment containing ##os ##midi ##oscillator (hm, quite an odd object)) that can then be read back by the help-browser is more what you're suggesting (I got that feeling from the threads you linked Mathieu). A good bit of work there though, and it doesn't do anything for namespace issues, just ease-of-discovery.

But, I also do not think that the difficulties you guys are enumerating are enough to condemn the entire idea of organizing things more logically than by author. I can at least offer Python as example of an extremely well-organized set of libaries - I don't know the history of /how/ they came to be that way but i can easily "import functools, urllib, os, simpleosc, midi, Image, pickle", and it works phenomenally well.

Best Luke