[PD] Mess and redundancy in the Pd eco system
Fred Jan Kraan
fjkraan at xs4all.nl
Sat Jun 6 11:42:26 CEST 2015
On 2015-06-06 02:07 AM, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> I'd actually like to know better the issues behind extended, and why is
> it so hard to just update it to the newer vanilla version and let people
> manage/update the libraries/externals...
>
> Why, for instance, can't I update a library like cyclone and release a
> new updated version of extended (let it be 0.43) with the updated
> objects? What's the deal?
If you want Pd-extended 0.43 with the latest cyclone, the simplest way
_now_ would be to replace the cyclone directory in your Pd-extended
installation with the content of the appropriate zip on my site.
The build farm that used to create Pd-extended for all platforms is no
more. Only one server is buiding a distribution
(debian-wheezy-amd64.deb), but it is based on old sources, not the
latest from the svn/git repositories. The 'update link' between the
repositories and build server is also gone.
Roman accurately described the problems with maintaining Pd-extended as
is. Apparently nobody has the time _and_ knowledge _and_ resources to do
it. The 'vanilla' route seems more viable as it distributes the effort
over more people.
Greetings,
Fred Jan
>
> cheers
>
>
>
> 2015-06-05 20:24 GMT-03:00 Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com
> <mailto:porres at gmail.com>>:
>
> I'm actually ok with lots of mess, check my apartment.
>
> What actually bums me out is that the maintenance is dead, and
> there's no sign anything is gonna happen. Last time someone
> discussed it was 6 months ago and it just went silent...
>
> I'd really like to spend a lot of personal effort in this, Pd is a
> very important part of my work and I'd love to pay it back, but
> unfortunately I'm no programmer. I'll do what I can, I'll manage,
> I'll test it, I'll try to clean the mess, I'll report bugs and
> organize/manage the project. I'll even study and start programming
> what I can. Count me in, but without an actual community, there's no
> deal.
>
> I just collaborated with supercollider, I helped in a bug report, I
> revised and rewrote the help of 3 objects, and it went nice and
> smoothly like a charm. They seem to have a nice community working on
> out there, we don't. It seems extended was all concentrated in Hans
> and not a community.
>
> cheers
>
>
> 2015-06-05 18:52 GMT-03:00 Roman Haefeli <reduzent at gmail.com
> <mailto:reduzent at gmail.com>>:
>
> On Fre, 2015-06-05 at 14:32 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> > > I couldn't find a [range] object in Pd-extended.
> >
> >
> > I have it in 0.42, maybe yours is 0.43 - it's located in
> flatspace,
> > but it doesn't even have a help file...
>
> Wow, you're missing so much new stuff... (and yes, I was checking
> 0.43-extended)
>
> > Well, this all makes me say how I find Pd-extended to be very
> messy,
> > with many redundanct objects, not to mention buggy or poorly
> > documented (many have no help whatsoever). As I dig further, I
> just
> > find more of all this... I know this directs this thread to
> another
> > discussion, but I'd really hope for the update and maintenance
> active
> > again, and that I could help cleaning some stuff up.
>
> I _believe_ Pd-extended was meant to be collection of as much
> software
> as was/is available for Pd. It respected the libraries (I'm sure
> this is
> argued by some, regarding multi-object libs vs. single-object
> externals)
> and put it into namespaces so that the user can decide what to
> use and
> what not. One could also say it deferred the burden to deal with the
> mess on the user. But it made much of the existing Pd ecosystem
> available to the masses - which I consider a huge achievement -
> and you
> can more or less assume that a patch made on platform Y will
> work the
> same on platform X with the same version of Pd-extended.
>
> I think tiding it all up is again a huge task. It's all free
> software,
> so anyone could do it. Having followed this list for a few years, I
> don't believe in the "authoritative" collection of Pd externals and
> abstraction anymore. People are using software in different ways for
> different purposes, and one can observe that many create their
> own nice
> tidied-up unified collections of abstractions (mtl, rjlib,
> netpd, etc.)
> and none of them gained so much traction that they would be used
> by a
> majority of the Pd users. I even think that trying it would be a
> lost
> game and would end up with endless mailing list debates.
>
> Retrospectively, it looks like maintaining something like
> Pd-extended is
> a too complex task to be distributed among many and too much for a
> single person (Pd-L2ork being the counter example). I sense
> agreement on
> the notion that effort is better spent on making separate libraries
> easily accessible/distributable. People willing to help could
> focus on
> the external they have the most interest in. It already started in
> Debian, where IOhannes, Hans (mainly) and me (to some lesser degree)
> worked on creating proper Debian packages of a lot of externals.
> Similar
> could be done for other platforms, too. Pd-extended could be the
> collection of those packages that are available on all major
> platforms
> (or whatever).
>
> Personally, I suffer most from the fact, that Pd-extended is a
> separately maintained Pd with patches on one hand and a
> collection of
> externals on the other. If it would be simply a Pd with a
> collection of
> externals, it would be much simpler to just update Pd and add -
> for all
> I care - a frozen collection of externals. Pd-extended was
> always one
> or two versions behind Pd. Now it's already three. If I want to
> make my
> stuff portable and available to non-Pd-savvy people, I have to stick
> with compatibility with Pd-extended 0.43, which is a huge pain,
> considering what more recent versions of Pd offer ([array], [text],
> [oscparse], new methods for time based objects, etc.).
>
> I agree with you that there is a lot of mess and redundancy. But
> I'm not
> sure if it matters that much.
>
> Roman
>
>
>
>
>
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