[PD] Cyclone future

Dan Wilcox danomatika at gmail.com
Mon Feb 22 19:05:28 CET 2016


> On Feb 22, 2016, at 10:33 AM, Alexandre Torres Porres <porres at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> That's what's happening! It's from 0.2beta1 and on, not 0.1-Alpha56, I was just trying to be accurate in the genealogy of repositories. Fred did a great amount of work departing from 0.1-Alpha56 - available in Extended and in this original repository https://git.puredata.info/cgit/svn2git/libraries/miXed.git/ <https://git.puredata.info/cgit/svn2git/libraries/miXed.git/> - he forked it to https://github.com/electrickery/pd-cyclone <https://github.com/electrickery/pd-cyclone> and started working on it. A 0.1-Alpha57 is also available and was provided by him, but this is marked as "unreleased" in the puredata.info <http://puredata.info/> website and only the 0.2beta1 (current state of his repo) is now available via deken.

Ah ok. Just checking :) I saw the “pd-extended” part and it seemed like you were starting from that version.

> By the way, I also think there are lessons to be learned, and I have to admit I'm not used to dealing and negotiating in a collaboration of free software like this. I'm really unaware of the common practice regarding ethics, politics, etiquete and all. I hope to learn from this episode and you all, and I also hope you can cope with me eventually not knowing better, any constructive criticism of  any of my actions are hihgly welcome. thanks…


We all appreciate your enthusiasm, don’t get me wrong. Collaborating on open source, in some ways, requires collaborating more with the people and their interests/schedules themselves than on company projects where the hierarchy and management is strictly enforced. Not everyone is supported by an institution in this work and most contribute when they can in their “free” time. For better or worse, work tends toward areas of personal interest and direct collaborations occur at overlaps. People will volunteer to take up work on something but they are of course free to drop it at any time.

It’s more of an anarchistic collaboration where, when we have enough people and enough energy to overlap the areas that need work, we can get a lot done. Problems arise when there isn’t enough time/energy/people to cover everything and things narrow down to individuals suddenly feeling inundated with bugs & feature requests. In this case, it’s best to pitch in by asking questions as to “where and how can I help”, then providing ideas, examples, & code.

I immediately think of deken. There were many *long* discussions about the future of pd and pd-extended that essentially boiled down to: "we need to do something" & "nobody will probably work on extended". The first conclusion was obvious & the second conclusion came from essentially everyone waiting for everyone else to start “working on pd-extended”. That didn’t happen, so more *long* discussions ensued that reiterated the first conclusion.

In the mean time, a set of developers started working on some example tools, taking into account their views towards the discussion of “we need to do something.” This work resulted in pd-lib-builder (make externals easy to build outside of pd-extended) and deken (make externals easy to install on pd vanilla). Once both projects were released for testing, the discussion changed from theory to practice and many improvements have taken place since. We now have a direction forward. (Giant thanks to everyone involved!)

I’m not saying discussion itself is unwanted, just the kind that starts getting cyclical and draining. Sometimes, you’ve got to put the code up to prove/test a point that others can join in on. Convince via example as opposed to convince via debate. A great example of this is the frequent patch trading that happens after someone asks “what’s the best way to XYZ in pd?” In some ways, working on externals and pd itself happens in the same manner, it’s just a little more difficult to write & share the TCL/TK & C code.

In any case, we’re all here because we believe in open source and pure data. We don’t agree on everything, but we work to find areas of agreement and move forward.

--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika <https://twitter.com/danomatika>
danomatika.com <http://danomatika.com/>
robotcowboy.com <http://robotcowboy.com/>
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