[PD] impure data

[jfm3]

The good news is after many years I'm finally going to finish my 
undergraduate degree, and my wife and I bought a house. The bad news is 
there hasn't been a pure-data.org update for too long, and I haven't 
made much sound in the last half a year.

I finally have some time to devote to this. I'm working on the long 
overdue update to the web site. Part of it is a collection of links to 
stray externals, all of which are really great. There are getting to be 
so many of them, the situation is getting out of hand. Not to get too 
ambitious, but I'd like to propose a new software distribution of Pd 
called "impure data". It would bundle externals with the specific 
version of Pd that they work best with. As MSP absorbs externals into 
the main distribution, they could disappear from the impure data 
distribution. I envision impure data to also contain a library of useful 
patches, like "alternate" and "once".

I have no access to win32 machines. Someone with a win32 compiler would 
have to compile and/or tweak the distribution to work on that platform. 
Same for SGI. It's been years since I've run a compiler on one.

You can help me get your external or external library into impure data 
by doing the following:

1) Release the source code under the GPL, LGPL, or other OSI approved 
license. See http://www.opensource.org for the OSI definition.

2) Put the source code in a directory named "foobar-1.1" where foobar is 
the name of your external or library and 1.1 is the version. In that 
directory should be a "configure" script such that I can run 
"./configure --help" and see what's going on. There should also be a 
Makefile that builds the software without being given any arguments.

3) "make install" should put the .pd_linux files that result from "make" 
in "$(PREFIX)/lib/pd/extra". Documentation for externals should be 
entirely in the form of patches and be installed in 
"$(PREFIX)/lib/pd/doc/5.reference". Higher level documentation or 
general example patches can go in "$(PREFIX)/lib/pd/doc/7.stuff/foobar" 
where foobar is like it was in 2) above.

4) Publish a .tar.gz file of your patch named like "foobar-1.1.tar.gz". 
Put it somewhere that won't keep changing. Send me the URL, and send me 
email directly when you publish a new version.

I'm not sure what to do about GEM and Framestein. GEM is huge and seems 
to require compile time tweaking for particular 3D platforms. 
Framestein, although open source, is windows-only due to being 
implemented in delphi (?). I welcome comments regarding how these may be 
integrated.

Now off to see what has been developing on the pd-wiki.

(jfm3)