[PD] PD and externals, questions and compressions

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Tue Mar 16 15:34:28 CET 2004


On Tuesday, Mar 16, 2004, at 03:49 America/New_York, Frank Barknecht 
wrote:

> Hallo,
> thewade hat gesagt: // thewade wrote:
>
>> One: What dictates which externels get included in the pd OFFICAL
>> release? For example pd has netsend and netrecieve, but I saw that
>> somebody said that OSC is used for that as well; who decides when
>> OSC does this better than netsend and netrecieve? I have no idea of
>> what OSC is, im just using that as an example.
>
> netsend/netreceive aren't really externals, they are internals
> because they are compiled into your pd executeably right from the
> start.
>
> Miller decides, what becomes an internal in Pd.
>
> There is not much advantage in having lots of externals in Pd this
> way. For example, OSC had some small bugs (like "the negative float
> bug") that were possible to fix really fast in the Pd cvs. There is be
> no waiting time until there would be if OSC was in an official Pd
> version.
>
> However I still do think, that in this specific case OSC should in the
> end be an internal part of main Pd, because OSC is such an important
> protocol for network communication between apps.

With the distribution packages gaining in popularity, the distinction 
between 'internal' and 'external' is blurring.  We have Debian .debs, a 
Windows installer, a MacOS X installer, and PlanetCCRMA .rpms (if only 
these where in the CVS...).  All of these have a substantial amount of 
'external' code, but you could only tell what's external by researching 
it.  Personally, I use a lot of 'externals' without even thinking about 
whether they'll be available since they are in the packages on all the 
platforms that I use.

.hc





More information about the Pd-list mailing list