[ardour-dev] deep design question: help requested (rapidly)

[Paul Davis]

One of the premises of Ardour, inherited from studying other DAWs such
as ProTools, Nuendo and Samplitude, is that the UI should offer the
user a list of all regions, possibly filtering/hiding parts of it in
various ways if the user asks for that.

Assuming that this premise is true (and it seems like a good one),
lets suppose that we have a region, we'll call it region A. we modify
region A, perhaps by trimming it or some other operation. we end up
with a modified version. there are two choices with how we can
implement this:

   1) it could be the same region, but with modified data. call that
        region A'
   2) it could be a new region, similar to A but different in whatever
        way was involved in the edit. call that region B.

put more abstractly, is it possible to edit a region, or is it only
possible to create a new region based on the old one?

at the moment, ardour is using strategy (1), which leads to a
problem. after the edit, what does the session list contain:

	  [ region A ] OR
	  [ region A'] OR
	  [ region A, region A' ]

ardour used to use strategy (2), but the way we implemented it led to
many nasty issues.

comments are urgently sought ..

--p