[PD-dev] Packaging of Libraries

[IOhannes m zmölnig]

Am 12. Dezember 2019 18:53:35 MEZ schrieb Pierre Alexandre Tremblay <tremblap at gmail.com>:
>Dear IOhannes
>
> I
>cannot package the help files tidily in a help folder, they seem to
>have to share the same folder as the external. Do these need to be top
>level folder?

no (or yes, depending on what you mean with "top-level folder")


anyhow, the curreny behaviour is not a limitation of the pkg-format (.dek), but a decision on the Pd-side that was made decades ago.

put simple:
- object-definitions (aka "externals") should be on the first-level of your library folder (eg. if the library is called *foo*, yoy'll have " foo/bar.dll", rather than "foo/externals/bar.dll"), else your users will have to jump through hoops to load your library.
- help-patches must° be in the same directory as the object-definition (" foo/bar-help.pd"), else pd will not find them.
- supplementary material (soundfiles, tutorials, html-documentation, passwords, ...) can go into subfolders (eg "foo/sounds/bell.aif")

this has worked well for quite some time, with simple one-object libs to libraries of several hundreds of objects.

i wouldn't advise to create a superficial sense of "tidiness" that merely creates inconsistency.



mfg.hft.fsl
IOhannes

° there are ways to code around that in C, but they often create more confusion