[PD-dev] Compiling externals for Windows

[Roman Haefeli]

On Sun, 2015-06-21 at 20:17 +0800, Chris McCormick wrote:

> If you have a chance to try out the 'freeverb~' external I uploaded on a
> Pd-vanilla 0.46 from Miller and to let me know if that works for you on
> Windows that would be very useful. If it works I'll upload more of the
> old Pd-extended externals binaries.

I tested on my work computer with Windows 7. Things seem to be slightly
different in Windows 7 compared to Windows XP. The Deken documentation
says it downloads and extracts externals to %AppData%\Pd. That is not
the case on Windows 7. It seems Pd (and Deken) have %AppData% hard-coded
to "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files", which seems wrong on Windows 7. On my
box, %AppData% is set to C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Roaming.

Deken can't download to '%ProgramFiles%\Common Files', because it would
need higher privileges to do so. In order to still be able to test it, I
created a symlink (I figured those exist in Windows,too) 'Pd' in %
ProgramFiles%\Common Files pointing to C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData
\Roaming\Pd. Now, Deken was able to download the freeverb external, but
it couldn't extract the package:

---
Unable to extract package automatically.
Please perform the following steps manually:
1. Unzip C:/Program Files (x86)/Common
Files/Pd/freeverb~(Windows-i386-32)-externals.zip.
2. Copy the contents into C:/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Pd.
---

This is what I did (a Windows Explorer showing the contents of the
archive popped up, so it was easy to move it to the correct place).
Finally, I was able to load the external and I played around with the
help-file. All seemed fine.

Probably the path issue needs to be already fixed in Pd?

I couldn't figure out why Deken cannot extract the archive on its own.
Might this be also a privilege issue?

Roman