[PD] FLOSS book Lists chapter

[Jonathan Wilkes]

--- On Tue, 2/15/11, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:

> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> Subject: Re: [PD] FLOSS book Lists chapter
> To: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "Hans-Christoph Steiner" <hans at eds.org>, pd-list at iem.at
> Date: Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 7:19 PM
> On Sun, 13 Feb 2011, Jonathan Wilkes
> wrote:
> 
> > As well as in svn, where, for example, list-abs is in
> the abstractions folder, but there are plenty of libraries
> in "externals" that are made up only of abstractions.
> 
> That might because it's forbidden for any externals to be
> in the abstractions folder. I once tried to include 1 % of C
> code in an abstractions library I had put in abstractions/ ,
> and was told I had to move it out. Preventively, people can
> put abstractions libraries in externals/ so that they never
> have to move them.
> 
> Does that seem like an accurate hypothesis ?

Yes.

> 
> What else would be a reason to put those libraries in
> externals/ ?
> 
> >>> I say that even though at the implementation
> level, abstractions aren't classes, for the user, it works
> like a class. Also there are many externals that don't
> include abstractions but are nonetheless compatible with Pd
> vanilla.
> >> 
> >> What part of the text are you referring to, in
> particular ?
> > 
> > The last sentence states that list-abs "doesn't
> require any externals so that it is compatible with vanilla
> Pd as well".
> 
> Yeah, that's nonsense. Pd-vanilla is the origin of the
> <m_pd.h> interface for making externals.

Btw-- the manual makes a distinction between "abstractions" and 
"externs".

> 
> The idea of Vanilla-without-externals is probably most
> useful to ZenGarden users, who can't compile any existing
> externals, because ZenGarden was designed to be incompatible
> with Pd-Vanilla. It is because of this incompatibility, that
> Zengarden users are led to excessively focus on what's
> compatible with Vanilla-without-Externals, because that's
> all that the ZenGarden project aims to support.
> 
> Just another hypothesis. What do you think ?

I think it's useful to people doing stuff with audio who want to learn 
Pd without being surrounded by a haze of thousands of possibly useful, 
possibly buggy, poorly documented object classes that may or may not 
be usable for someone on a different machine.  The danger, however, is 
that one can end up arbitrarily limiting the types of projects one does to a narrow subset that fit the types of tools available with 
"Pd-minus-externals"*.  Then again maybe the limited set of tools is what attracts that user in the first place...

* "Puritan Data"?

-Jonathan

> 
> 
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