[PD] pd-ext paths, libs and help

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Mar 5, 2008, at 9:57 PM, marius schebella wrote:

> Roman Haefeli wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 12:09 -0500, marius schebella wrote:
>>
>>> declare -path oscx is also doing nothing. oh, wait!
>>
>> as written in the declare-help.pd, -path is relative to pd, so you  
>> have
>> to use:
>>
>> [declare -path oscx] (assuming the folder is <pd-path>/extra/oscx)
>>
>> roman
>
> but that is exaclty what I used! (see 2 lines above...) something is
> broken with declare. (see mails before).
> hans, would it be a problem to add all the missing paths to the
> configuration file of pdxt? adding all these external libraries but  
> not
> supporting them seems weird.
> marius.

I had a discussion about this with Roman on #dataflow.  Basically,  
having all of the libraries loaded by default isn't a workable long- 
term solution.  Let's say we have two libraries, firstlib and  
secondlib.  firstlib is loaded first, secondlib is loaded second.   
secondlib has an object called [foo].  It's great and a lot of people  
use it all the time.  It's in lots of patches just as [foo].

The author of firstlib never use secondlib or [foo], then creates an  
object that does something different, but is called [foo].  Since  
firstlib is already being loaded first, then firstlib's new [foo]  
will override secondlib's well-established [foo], and everyone's  
patches break.

So we need to come up with something better.  One thing that will  
always work is having the library load order embedded in each patch.   
That means a bit more work when writing a patch, but this is how  
many, many languages handle this problem (python, ruby, Tcl  
namespaces, C++, etc.).

So for this upcoming Pd-extended release, I plan on focusing on this  
problem and getting import/declare working well.

As for missing help files, please write them and submit them to the  
bug tracker!  Or submit a bug report!

.hc


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