Alexey_Nigin wrote:I have noticed a few strange things in Golly's pattern collection...
Thanks for starting this thread. I'll review and fix the above items eventually. Anyone is welcome to add comments and suggestions for Golly's pattern collection here -- I admit it's gotten seriously out of date in the past few years.
I'd like to do a fairly thorough overhaul of the collection, and also the Life Lexicon, for Golly 2.8 or Golly 3.0 or somewhere in there. But it's the kind of thing that I have to pick away at very slowly. It's a big job, and at the moment I don't have several weeks straight to devote to writing comments and making difficult executive decisions.
There's been some discussion on the
golly-test list about how to organize a much larger pattern collection that can still be integrated with Golly in some way... i.e., maybe sorted into similar categories -- oscillators, guns, signal circuitry, etc.
The idea that brought it up was that the new Herschel conduit / elementary conduit / H-to-G / H-to-G(n) collections seemed too large to fit in the base collection, but it would be nice to be able to let people know that they were available for download from (let's say) the Very Large Patterns repository, which I think relatively few people even notice. Most people wouldn't be interested, but for the people who download it, it might be nicer if it showed up in the Signal-Circuitry folder instead of off in some monolithic downloads folder along with every other downloaded file.
Maybe it will work to set up an extended collection as a ZIP file with the same subfolders as Golly's pattern collection, but that won't drop files into the right places automatically unless there's a script in the ZIP file to unpack everything correctly -- and not everyone has Python installed, and not everyone might be interested in having their pattern folders automatically adjusted, anyway. (?)