You totally miss the point.  Your 3.49x is neither a superset nor a
subset of my 3.49 (and I invented version numbers on Csound so you
calling your different system 3.49... is misleading; basically I claim
prior art!).  So the numbers are misleading; there are bugs in your
version not in mine, and probably vice versa.  

And ... No I do not think the Linux people are lucky to be able to
choose.  I think they are being confused and mislead.  I want my SGI
system at the university to behave the same as my PC system, my MAC
system and my Linux system.  That seems not to be possible without
building it oneself on some subset of the platforms.


I am not sure if I have to explain the entire history of this; some of
teh Csound community are trying to produce a coherent tool for all
musicians regardless of their hardware platform.  Do I have to spell
it all out?

On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, J P Fitch wrote:

[snip]
> And ... No I do not think the Linux people are lucky to be able to
> choose.  I think they are being confused and mislead.  I want my SGI
> system at the university to behave the same as my PC system, my MAC
> system and my Linux system.  That seems not to be possible without
> building it oneself on some subset of the platforms.

They don't have to use the linux version. They can very well use
yours.

> I am not sure if I have to explain the entire history of this; some of
> teh Csound community are trying to produce a coherent tool for all
> musicians regardless of their hardware platform.  Do I have to spell
> it all out?

That's all very good. Perhaps people can decide for themselves, or
do we have to spell out all their do's and don'ts?

Bye

Nicola

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicola Bernardini
E-mail: nicb@axnet.it
 
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe
the picture.  Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described
with pictures.

Perhaps I shouldn't really be commenting  on this, as I haven't actively
been using Csound lately. But I will anyway :-)

I'm with John Fitch on this one. I can't see any possible advantage to
having multiple versions. Can someone please explain why it is 
needed in this case? 
Is there some reason why the sources can't be merged?

If it is a temporary situation, due to lack of time to bring every thing
back to the main distribution, perhaps the Linux version should be renamed
to avoid confusion.

I sadly suspect there must be some political garbage going on here :-(

Larry


--  Larry Troxler  --  lt@westnet.com  --  Patterson, NY USA  --
  

On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Larry Troxler wrote:

[snip]
> I'm with John Fitch on this one. I can't see any possible advantage to
> having multiple versions. Can someone please explain why it is 
> needed in this case? 

Can you see advantages in having instead one unique version? Could you spell
them out?

> Is there some reason why the sources can't be merged?

No. In fact I do that all the time :-)

[snip]
> I sadly suspect there must be some political garbage going on here :-(

Huh? Which would be? Can you please be more specific?

Relax,

Nicola

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nicola Bernardini
E-mail: nicb@axnet.it
 
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe
the picture.  Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described
with pictures.

In brief, I agree.

First of all, I think everyone involved in this has the best of intentions.
There's been a lot of hard work put in here by a number of individuals.
I think it's important that we understand each others goals, and avoid
if at all possible working at cross-purposes.

I'd argue that the Computer Music community would benefit most from two
somewhat contradictory goals for Csound development.  One, there should
be a single standard version so that time invested learning and using
Csound isn't wasted due to incompatible features, and so that scores and
orchestras can be easily shared by those who wish to do so.  The second
goal is the exploration of new ideas and technologies in computer music
synthesis, and of ways that Csound can be extended to support these new
techniques.

I think John Fitch has done a fine job of harmonizing these two goals.
The capabilities of the "official" version of Csound grow almost
weekly.  In fact, I'd argue that the rate of advancement has been such
that efforts to maintain synchronization between that version and others
has become quite a challenge.  Just the same, I'd argue that keeping
things "in-sync" with the base version is important.  It may be necessary
to fall "out-of-sync" for a while during development, especially if new
features go beyond the complexity of a new opcode, but eventual re-
integration should be an objective.  (As the Linux group knows, an absolute
goal of mine in working on an Alpha port of Csound was that my methods
apply as simply as possible to the Bath version of Csound, and be
maintainable with it.)

I'm not arguing against anyone working on fundamentally incompatible
changes to Csound, such as alternative parsers or versions wedded to
particular hardware or OS's.  But these efforts should be labeled as such--
"Csound-derived," "Foo-Csound," or whatever.  If the Linux group wants
to head in this direction, they should make their intentions explicit
(and come up with a catchy new name to disassociate themselves from
vanilla Csound).  If they want, instead, to insure that "official" Csound
remains Linux-friendly, then it sounds like there are some fences which
need mending.

		-Ed