[PD] *.lua => *.pd_lua or *.l_lua?

[marius schebella]

Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> The part of this whole equation that is the problem is the name  
> clash.  That's how this thread started.  Frank said that if he had a  
> support lib with the same name as another Pd objectclass, then there  
> was a name clash.
> 
> Loading a file that is not meant to be an objectclass is not really  
> problem, AFAIK, it just won't create an object.  Oftentimes people  
> use this as a hack to load libraries.
> 
> Since the core of this problem is name clashes, then why not use the  
> existing techniques for dealing with that?  I think this discussion  
> is getting too abstract... I just this there already are far too many  
> file extensions in Pd, I have had to do extra work because of them,  
> and have yet to see the benefit.  That's my two bits...
> 
> .hc


what I found out from reading franks emails is, that to run one lua 
script in pd, he sometimes also has lua scripts that are maybe included 
or referenced or needed to run that one script.
and when he gives away a bundle which includes these scripts, then these 
additional scripts pollute the pd naming scheme.
this is not so different to images that are shipped with a patch, you 
just don't expect that pd would try to open them.
and according to franks mail, it obviously *is* a problem that externals 
don't open correctly anymore, but instead lua spits out an error that it 
can't load the object correctly (and does not try to look for another 
file with a *.pd extension instead).
there are several suggested solutions right now:
* restrict the lua loader to certain directories only (different than 
the pd searchpatchs)
* conventions for search order: first libs, then pd patches, then lua 
files. but then you search the tree 3 times.
* change file extension so that pdlua will never try to open *.lua 
scripts, just as pd does not try to load *.jpg files
I think the pdlua programmer has to look at the pdlua specs anyway if 
she wants to write her own scripts, so the learning curve is not much 
steeper if the user has to learn "name the script in the following way 
so that it is accepted by pdlua.
or you tell every user that in order to run a patch, she has to drag the 
lua files to a special lua-directory.
marius.