Re: [Om-synth] patch repository

[Dave Robillard]

On Wed, 2005-19-10 at 14:06 +0200, Atte André Jensen wrote:
> Hi
> 
> A while back Dave expressed a wish for an online repository for sharing 
> om patches. Are there any news on this?
> 
> For a new commer a bunch of patches would make om much more accessible. 
> Both for learning and for instant playability. This is something that is 
> missing with most OSS soft synths.
> 
> Although I might play with other peoples patces, were they there, the 
> main reason I'm asking is that I'm starting getting more into om now, 
> and I'm generating some patches that I'd like to share...
> 
> For me the main features of such a repository are:
> 
> 1) Up/download possible by script or other automated thingy. I'll 
> probably not use it a lot if I have to log in to a web-site and browse 
> around.
> 
> 2) Some kind of grouping or ordering besides the obvious name, date and 
> size. Dave already mentioned this...
> 
> Would it be an idea to integrate some kind of client to the repository 
> in om_gtk? A friend of mine is one of the mian developers on the open 
> source cms typo3 which has this ability. In this case its modules 
> offering different addon functionality, but the idea is the same: 
> instant access to a common pool of information. Just a thought, not even 
> sure what I think of it myself :-)
> 
> BTW: For now I updated my om patch tarball 
> (http://www.atte.dk/om/attes_om_patches.tgz) with a couple of new 
> patches, so...

The new plan is to give each patch a globally unique URN (something like
drobilla:synths:pad, or more pedantically urn:om:drobilla:synths:pad
etc), and have om_gtk support a patch path where any references to a
patch will be searched for.  The patch path can be local directories or
remote URLs.

The result of this approach is patch repository like functionality, but
noone actually needs to set up a centralised repository, you can just
upload your patches to wherever and let people know about it, and they
can add it to their paths - or just download them all, etc.

Centralisation is bad, anarchy is good. :)

This would also make it trivially possible to have an "official" patch
repository that just mirrors all known ones into one gigantic directory
of awesomeness.

Probably while I'm at it, some kind of simple versioning scheme should
be bolted on as well.

I like this idea quite a bit more than trying to build as big shiny
impressive patch repository site - mostly because a big shiny impressive
patch repository site simply isn't about to get built by anyone anytime
soon, if ever.  Plus, it eliminates the need for nuisances like creating
accounts and all that.

Thoughts anyone?

-DR-