[PD] Problems with maintaining Pd-extended (was Mess and redundancy...)
Alexandre Torres Porres
porres at gmail.com
Sat Jun 6 17:16:56 CEST 2015
Hi, this seems more of an accurate thread name for this so I changed it.
So, last time anyone discussed about the future of Extended was in the turn
of the year 6 months ago, and it kinda led nowhere. I'm aware there are
issues around, but I'd to know them in more details, please, if anyone
could tell me.
> Roman accurately described the problems with maintaining Pd-extended as
> is. Apparently nobody has the time _and_ knowledge _and_ resources to do
> it. The 'vanilla' route seems more viable as it distributes the effort
> over more people.
>
Please include me in the category of people who have no knowledge :)
In general, I get this problem, but I'd like to know more deeply why and
how come it is like it is. I might not be able to do the job myself, but I
guess I can understand the concept of things, how they work, and why it is
problematic. The 'vanilla' route is something I'm ok with, I even kinda
proposed it. But I'd like to insist in the extended route one last time,
until I see the problems it has and agree, in the end, that is best to
forget and discard it. So, questions:
- Why does the maintenance of Extended have to be concentrated in "one
person" - as opposed to distributing it to more people? I see it's too much
for one person, but why is it a a too complex task to be distributed among
many?
> The build farm that used to create Pd-extended for all platforms is no
> more. Only one server is buiding a distribution
> (debian-wheezy-amd64.deb), but it is based on old sources, not the
> latest from the svn/git repositories. The 'update link' between the
> repositories and build server is also gone.
>
- How come so much stuff is "gone" or "no more"? I see it hasn't been
maintained, but that the whole structure fell into pieces and would have to
be rebuilt "from scratch" is something else. Ok, so it seems someone needs
to take care of everything or it'll eventually vanish, but please give me
some details why this happens. Moreover, how hard would it be to put it all
back and running?
> Personally, I suffer most from the fact, that Pd-extended is a
> separately maintained Pd with patches on one hand
- Yeah, I see it is a "different" software/distribution. It's based on
vanilla, but it has other features. Perhaps this is the key point making it
too hard to take it further. I guess I can get that, but I still hope to
get more details about it. For instance, it's not clear to me why it always
had to be one or two versions behind vanilla. Why is it so hard to just get
the latest vanilla and "extend" it?
>From what I see, it seems to me that the development of Pd software was
never distributed amongst many, as in the hands of an actual community of
developers. Miller maintains vanilla on his own. Correct if I'm wrong, but
PD2Lork is also not driven by a team. Another example: Desire Data. Anyway,
regarding extended, it seems it always depended too much in Hans himself
than a group of developers. The developers in the Pd world seem to be
always people in separate projects, such as in the development of
externals/packages, but never in the conjunct task of making software
available.
So, is my observation right? Have people really never ever joined up as a
community to distribute software? If so, how come?
This aspect for me is the key to why something like extended or whatever
won't be able to exist. Technical details aside, if there's no dev group,
there's nothing. So this is very important I guess.
I know I'm missing much of the technical details, but my idea is that if Pd
Extended is up and running, it should be fairly easy for people to update
libraries (like Fred is doing with cyclone now) and release an updated
version with the updated objects... meaning we didn't have to wait for two
years for a bug fix. But somehow this only makes sense in the "vanilla
route".
Please help me out trying to figure this all out.
Thanks folks
2015-06-06 6:42 GMT-03:00 Fred Jan Kraan <fjkraan at xs4all.nl>:
> On 2015-06-06 02:07 AM, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> > 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?
>
> If you want Pd-extended 0.43 with the latest cyclone, the simplest way
> _now_ would be to replace the cyclone directory in your Pd-extended
> installation with the content of the appropriate zip on my site.
>
>
> Greetings,
>
> Fred Jan
> >
> > cheers
> >
> >
> >
> > 2015-06-05 20:24 GMT-03:00 Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com
> > <mailto: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
> > <mailto: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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>
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