[PD] pd extended development

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Wed Apr 16 09:01:58 CEST 2008


Hallo,
marius schebella hat gesagt: // marius schebella wrote:

> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> > 
> > Lots of people contribute, but I am the person who manages the 
> > releases.  Any help is welcome.  The path/import/declare stuff is 
> > currently a half-complete effort of Miller's and mine.
> 
> is there a page where this idea is documented? how is it supposed to 
> work in the future? I still don't know. will I have to include declare 
> in every patch that I write???

[declare] currently is rather useless. You can load a binary library
with [declare], but AFAIK Pd-extended doesn't have any libraries
except Gem. [declare -path] acts "funny", or rather, it's unclear
whether it should act differently when used in an abstraction instance
compared to being used standalone. 

Directory prefixes like [zexy/abs~] kind of solve the problem. The
problem is, that nobody likes them. (Though probably Hans does;) E.g.
I remember that you were complaining quite loudly when the new
pd-extended version didn't preload many libraries and libdirs. But of
course preloading libraries makes the [zexy/abs~] approach pointless,
except for objects in private or rarely used libraries. 

OTOH the names of the directories in CVS have been chosen to be the
names of the prefixes, which is something, several developers didn't
like, but some way to name the subdires had to be chosen of course.
Example: Martin doesn't like [mrpeach/packOSC], I don't like the
redundant [list-abs/list-abs] etc. 

But the real problem is this: Advertising the libdir directories as
namespaces has created hundreds of possible new object names. Of
course people use these new names, and now backwards compatibility has
to take these new names into account.  Any "pd-condensed" which I
recently invented as a joke would still need to support these new
names (or just ignore them). And if some future, cleaned up version of
pd-extended includes [abs~] globally, it also will need to offer
support for [zexy/abs~], [creb/abs~], [markex/abs~] and
[flatspace/abs~] to not break patches written in the advertised style.
Not very beautiful.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                                     _ ______footils.org__




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