[PD][proposal] pd externs/extra/abs policy

Krzysztof Czaja czaja at chopin.edu.pl
Thu Mar 14 20:20:29 CET 2002


hi again,

after taking a closer look, I rejected my original tree-searching
idea.  It is probably not worth the fuss, because it cannot be done
well with any simple kind of path-walking performed during loading
of a library.  If my (hazy) idea was to be rendered into a real
design, there would need to be an extra knowledge used -- gathered
beforehand.  This preprocessing is needed both to speed up the
search, somewhat like locatedb or ls-R of texhash, and to filter
out obsolete versions, resolve name clashes, etc.

So if there was to be a kind of personalized pdb on every Pd user's
hard disk, why not to design a standard mechanism for registering
libraries with a version number, and a full list of external classes:
their names, help file locations, `assistance' descriptions,
links to reference pages, etc.

This user-pdb or system-pdb could be updated during library
installation pass, and then consulted by the sys_load_lib() call
in Pd -- before or after or instead of searching .../pd/extra
and the -paths.

The next step would be to connect user-pdb to graz-pdb (or mirrors)
ala deb :)

 >|

Krzysztof Czaja wrote:
...
 > flat directory.  I would rather put my stuff somewhere down the tree.
...
 > 2. Design an optional tree-searching (or full-blown globbing)
 > mechanism for open_via_path() to be used whenever loading
 > libraries (and possibly abstractions) is involved.




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