4.1.1 Project Descriptors

Projects specifications are stored in patcher-projects. This user option is actually a list of project descriptors. Each project descriptor has the following form: ‘(NAME DIR :OPTION VALUE ...)’

• NAME is a string naming your project.
• DIR is a string specifying the directory in which to find the project. It can also be set to nil in which case Patcher will prompt you for the project's location every time it is needed (such projects are called “floating” projects). This feature may be useful when you maintain several clones of the same repository but want to define it only once in Patcher. Another potential use of this is when several independent projects happen to share exactly the same set of options.
• The remainder of a project descriptor is a sequence of zero or more option/value pairs that we call project options. All option names start with a colon. The type of a value depends on the corresponding option. For example, there is a project option named :to-address, whose value should be a string giving the email address to which you want to send Patcher messages.

When Patcher needs the value for a particular project option, it looks for it directly in the project descriptor, but also in other places. This process is described below.

• Themes: Collections of options
• Project inheritance: Getting options from other projects
• Fallbacks: Default values for project options
• Retrieval: The process of getting an option's value
• Inheritance or theme?: The proper way to factor out option values