[PD] Problems with maintaining Pd-extended (was Mess and redundancy...)

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

what do you mean by "monolithic distribution"?
cheers

2015-06-08 6:04 GMT-03:00 Roman Haefeli <reduzent at gmail.com>:

> On Sun, 2015-06-07 at 19:44 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
>
>
> > such as why would it have to be concentrated in "one person"?
>
> I don't think it has to be. It turned out to be like that when Hans was
> still working on it. It think it was because Pd-extended is designed in
> a way that required to make a lot of decisions. Spreading that decision
> process across a group of people makes it orders of magnitude more
> complex. I believe the very nature of a monolithic distribution
> naturally leads to this kind of complexity. For instance, the version
> number of Pd-extended does not only reflect the Pd version it is based
> on, but it also defines a certain state/version of all included
> externals with their current features and bugs. If an external author
> was fixing a bug, they had to create a new release of their external and
> wait for the next release of Pd-extended for their new release of the
> external to be included. A release of Pd-extended has been always a huge
> thing that took a lot of time and care. Pd-extended burdened itself with
> a lot of responsibility. Only the question alone of what is included and
> what not and could lead to endless debates when decided by many instead
> of one. It seems the solution to this problem is: Don't try to answer it
> at all, let the user decide. Which in turn means: 'Let's make it easy
> for devs to distribute their stuff' and 'Let's make it easy for users to
> find and install stuff'.
>
>
> >  Why the build farm is gone and how hard would it be to put it all
> > back and running? Why does it always have to be one or two versions
> > behind vanilla and not just get the latest vanilla and "extend" it?
>
> I can't tell you the exact details, since I haven't been involved, but I
> guess because the whole process of creating a release was so complex and
> time consuming. A new version of Pd had to be imported, the patches
> specific to Pd-extended had to be applied, anything that broke had to be
> fixed, new releases of the available externals had to be imported,
> everything had to be tested for bugs and regressions...
>
> Also it has to be built for many platforms and architectures. It
> requires only one external build to fail for the whole build to fail.
> Until Pd-extended got built on all supported platforms and architectures
> successfully, there was no new release. I could imagine building alone
> is a huge task, considering that Ubuntu alone has 4-5 supported distro
> releases simultaneously.
>
> >  And also, why does it seem to me the pd distros always get
> > concentrated in one or just a handful of people?
>
> When new flavors have been created, frustration has been a driving
> force, at least that was my impression. People wanted features and
> submitted patches and they get never accepted or simply ignored. Slow Pd
> development made some  devs take things into their own hands and they
> started implementing whatever they desired. I don't think
> maintainability by the community was the driving concept. And when a
> flavor is not only a Pd flavor, but a whole distribution with a
> collection of libraries, then we are back at the discussion why it is so
> hard for a community to maintain a monolithic distribution.
>
>
> Roman
>
>
>
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