[PD-dev] loading classes: search by directory rather than extension

[Roman Haefeli]

On Sat, 2015-09-26 at 05:25 -0700, Miller Puckette wrote:

> My reason for suggesting putting them in "pd/extra" is that you already put 
> "pd" somewhere (and presumably chose where to put it) and
> if you relocate pd later the extra files will follow.  Also, you can then
> have different versions of Pd with different libraries loaded.

I see your point. Such an organization is practical for someone who
works on Pd related projects, I means it's quite a developer centric
view. I'd like to consider a user centric view, too: Tom wants to play
with a patch created by Alice. Alice doesn't know what how the users of
her patches install Pd (they might run it directly from the compilation
folder or they install Pd system-wide through the official repositories
of their distribution), she just specifies the list of the externals her
patch uses. Tom isn't familiar with how Pd search paths work, but he
manages to install all required dependencies to make Alice' patch work
when given quick instructions how to do it from the Pd GUI. 

Things are tremendously easier if sensible defaults that work
out-of-the-box automatically are chosen. I think having an automatically
created (hidden) pd directory somewhere in $HOME makes life a lot easier
for quite a common use case.

Roman
 
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