[PD] Mess and redundancy in the Pd eco system (was: [range] / [maxlib/scale] for audio)

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

I'd actually like to know better the issues behind extended, and why is it
so hard to just update it to the newer vanilla version and let people
manage/update the libraries/externals...

Why, for instance, can't I update a library like cyclone and release a new
updated version of extended (let it be 0.43) with the updated objects?
What's the deal?

cheers



2015-06-05 20:24 GMT-03:00 Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com>:

> I'm actually ok with lots of mess, check my apartment.
>
> What actually bums me out is that the maintenance is dead, and there's no
> sign anything is gonna happen. Last time someone discussed it was 6 months
> ago and it just went silent...
>
> I'd really like to spend a lot of personal effort in this, Pd is a very
> important part of my work and I'd love to pay it back, but unfortunately
> I'm no programmer. I'll do what I can, I'll manage, I'll test it, I'll try
> to clean the mess, I'll report bugs and organize/manage the project. I'll
> even study and start programming what I can. Count me in, but without an
> actual community, there's no deal.
>
> I just collaborated with supercollider, I helped in a bug report, I
> revised and rewrote the help of 3 objects, and it went nice and smoothly
> like a charm. They seem to have a nice community working on out there, we
> don't. It seems extended was all concentrated in Hans and not a community.
>
> cheers
>
>
> 2015-06-05 18:52 GMT-03:00 Roman Haefeli <reduzent at gmail.com>:
>
>> On Fre, 2015-06-05 at 14:32 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
>> > > I couldn't find a [range] object in Pd-extended.
>> >
>> >
>> > I have it in 0.42, maybe yours is 0.43 - it's located in flatspace,
>> > but it doesn't even have a help file...
>>
>> Wow, you're missing so much new stuff... (and yes, I was checking
>> 0.43-extended)
>>
>> > Well, this all makes me say how I find Pd-extended to be very messy,
>> > with many redundanct objects, not to mention buggy or poorly
>> > documented (many have no help whatsoever). As I dig further, I just
>> > find more of all this... I know this directs this thread to another
>> > discussion, but I'd really hope for the update and maintenance active
>> > again, and that I could help cleaning some stuff up.
>>
>> I _believe_ Pd-extended was meant to be collection of as much software
>> as was/is available for Pd. It respected the libraries (I'm sure this is
>> argued by some, regarding multi-object libs vs. single-object externals)
>> and put it into namespaces so that the user can decide what to use and
>> what not. One could also say it deferred the burden to deal with the
>> mess on the user. But it made much of the existing Pd ecosystem
>> available to the masses - which I consider a huge achievement - and you
>> can more or less assume that a patch made on platform Y will work the
>> same on platform X with the same version of Pd-extended.
>>
>> I think tiding it all up is again a huge task. It's all free software,
>> so anyone could do it. Having followed this list for a few years, I
>> don't believe in the "authoritative" collection of Pd externals and
>> abstraction anymore. People are using software in different ways for
>> different purposes, and one can observe that many create their own nice
>> tidied-up unified collections of abstractions (mtl, rjlib, netpd, etc.)
>> and none of them gained so much traction that they would be used by a
>> majority of the Pd users. I even think that trying it would be a lost
>> game and would end up with endless mailing list debates.
>>
>> Retrospectively, it looks like maintaining something like Pd-extended is
>> a too complex task to be distributed among many and too much for a
>> single person (Pd-L2ork being the counter example). I sense agreement on
>> the notion that effort is better spent on making separate libraries
>> easily accessible/distributable. People willing to help could focus on
>> the external they have the most interest in. It already started in
>> Debian, where IOhannes, Hans (mainly) and me (to some lesser degree)
>> worked on creating proper Debian packages of a lot of externals. Similar
>> could be done for other platforms, too. Pd-extended could be the
>> collection of those packages that are available on all major platforms
>> (or whatever).
>>
>> Personally, I suffer most from the fact, that Pd-extended is a
>> separately maintained Pd with patches on one hand and a collection of
>> externals on the other. If it would be simply a Pd with a collection of
>> externals, it would be much simpler to just update Pd and add - for all
>> I care - a frozen collection of externals. Pd-extended was always  one
>> or two versions behind Pd. Now it's already three. If I want to make my
>> stuff portable and available to non-Pd-savvy people, I have to stick
>> with compatibility with Pd-extended 0.43, which is a huge pain,
>> considering what more recent versions of Pd offer ([array], [text],
>> [oscparse], new methods for time based objects, etc.).
>>
>> I agree with you that there is a lot of mess and redundancy. But I'm not
>> sure if it matters that much.
>>
>> Roman
>>
>>
>
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