On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 15:19 +0200, Oliver Oli wrote:
> On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 5:52 PM, marius schebella
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > "Now, after more than 2.5 years of development and almost one year of a
> > graphical user interface, nobody tried to use nova, despite a talk on the
> > Linux Audio Conference 2007 in Berlin. Some people offered their help in the
> > development, but unfortunately nobody found the time to really contribute to
> > the source code. I am not completely sure, what is the reason for that, but
> > my guess is that most people, who are competent software developers are busy
> > with other pro jects and thus do not find the time to contribute to other
> > pro jects than their own."
>
> this thread is some weeks old, but i think still relevant.
>
> i installed nova, but had the impression, that it is not meant to be
> used by anyone else than developers. first it's hard to install. i
> think there should be binaries for osx (and windows?) and a source
> package for linux that compiles out of the box. then i found the GUI
> not intuitive at all, but maybe it's just the missing documentation /
> tutorials / examples.
>
> question is, why do you want to use Nova, when there is Pd and
> Max/MSP? both are easier to install, have a bigger community,
> documentation and many externals. i don't want to say that Nova is
> useless, it's just very very hard to compete with Pd and Max,
> especially when it's not obvious in which way Nova is better.
hi all
i am usually just lurking around here and am following the discussions
with interest.
i lack the skills to contribute to nova myself, unfortunately, but i
hope, that nova will grow an active community, although i am a very
active pd user these days. the reasons are, that pd seems to have lot of
issues that cannot (or only hardly) be solved, for social or technical
reasons. afaik, nova has addressed already most (all?) of the technical
issues (i admit that i never installed and tried nova myself; i'll do
so, after i will have finished my studies), that are never going to be
solved in pd (portability issues [between OS's and between distros of
pd], lacking realtime safety, name clashes etc.) . since tim is clearly
the head developer of nova (and i hope, he's going to keep that role for
a while) and could learn from the culprits in the pd development, i
believe it's much less likely, that social issues in the nova project
are going to slow down the on-going development, as it happened in many
cases in the pd-community. my impression is that the sentence 'do it
right from the beginning' quite well describes the nova project, whereas
miller rather follows a 'don't change anything, until it's really
urgent' policy. i am no dev myself, so correct me, if i say something
wrong, but afaik, many pd external devs use undocumented API's, which
makes it impossible afterwards to change the API in pd. the same for pd
users, who use undocumented and officially unsupported features, such as
dynamic patching or other undocumented messages to canvas or to pd,
which makes it impossible to touch those features without breaking old
patches, which leads to the situation, that many problems can only be
solved by using some kludge. millers conservatism on changing things
complicates a lot problems, because people (naturally) find ways and
kludges around unresolved issues; for instance, by writing external
classes, that conceptually clearly should be part of the internal class
library, where some pd-versions later an equivalent internal class is
added to pd by miller, while the external class is already heavy in use.
then two flavours of pd are widely used, whose patches aren't always
portable between both. pd is lacking as simple things as a general (and
working!) layout, where to install externals and their respecting
helpfiles. in pd world, although miller objectively holds the office of
the ,benevolent dictatorship', i have the impression he refuses to act
accordingly (by not commenting or not answering mails from the list
regarding important pd problems; he doesn't accept patches for no
obvious reason). as pd-dev, you can either wait years and hope that some
things are going to improve or you can make your hands dirty, while
making the pd world messier. my impression is (without being involved in
the development), that all this messiness is ruled out from the
beginning in the nova project.
the netpd project, that i am working on, heavily suffers from above
issues. it's very unlikely, that netpd is ever going to be realtime
safe, because changing the dsp graph in pd leads to drop-outs (which
cannot be avoided in netpd). also solving portability issues is a never
ending story in the netpd development. that is why i think, that nova is
kind of the second chance to do better. for (not only, but also)
egoistic reasons, i wish for the nova project to see many people
contributing to it and also a growing community of users.
yo, this is why i would like to use nova instead of pd in the future. i
can't tell anything about from max user perspective, though.
roman
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