[PD] future of externals (was Re: pddp drafts)

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Mon Sep 17 16:52:46 CEST 2007


Hallo,
marius schebella hat gesagt: // marius schebella wrote:

> peace!

peace++! ;) 

> frank, I don't want you to fade out on that discussion, because I think 
> it is more than just the pddp problem and it is an interesting 
> discussion for the future.
> 
> 'pd core without externals makes no sense/cannot be separated from 
> externals.' what do you think?

I wouldn't completely subscribe to this view. Currently
MSP/Vanilla/core Pd is the greatest common divisor (and the only one.)

> at the moment the externals are programmer libraries (packed together 
> because they were created by a developer). But in the future there will 
> be "standard libraries" which do not exist yet. these standard libraries 
> will be structured like standard libraries in other programming 
> languages. they will have clear naming conventions and everybody will be 
> happy. what do you think?

We share the same vision of a bright future. Unfortunatly at present
much things are still missing. As I wrote in my mails in the
"libraries" thread, extensions to Pd in the form of externals and
abstractions currently are a bit messy to set up. Some people use the
class names directly "[niagara]", others use them with a prefix
"[zexy/niagara]" (even pd-extended users do this differently), while
others don't have "niagara" at all.[*] 

While I agree with Hans and many others, that in the end namespaces
are the way to go, currently it's a bit of a mess. That's why I'm
indeed doing some propaganda to restrict onself with using externals
in help files (and so some extent in abstraction libraries, too),
because it forces people to set up their systems in a certain way,
where the final way isn't decided yet. And sometimes the two currently
most popular ways (with namespace and without) are even conflicting.

[*] Actually before pd-extended it was a bit simpler, as people were
either using [niagara] or no [niagara] at all. That didn't work for
[counter], though ...

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__




More information about the Pd-list mailing list