[PD] Preferred/best practice for loading external objects

Miller Puckette msp at ucsd.edu
Wed May 4 23:36:26 CEST 2016


On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 11:17:32PM +0200, IOhannes m zmölnig wrote:
> On 05/04/2016 06:46 PM, Miller Puckette wrote:
> > I agree this is a problem.  On my machine, selecting (for instance)
> > freeverb~ from the deken plug-in creates a directory 
> > ~/pd/extra/freeverb~ 
> 
> the actual Pd binary you are running is ~/pd/bin/pd, right?
> 
Yes.

> > which would be a good place to put it except for
> > the fact that that is my git repo (I then have to move it or else I'd 
> > end up publishing freeverb~ in vanilla!).
> > 
> > I think deken should always query the user whether it's OK to install
> 
> hmm, i'm not so fond about *always query*, this is why i turned this off...
> i don't even think it is a great user experience if Pd asks the user
> once in each session (though that's way better than asking *every* time).
> 
> 
> that's not to say that i don't agree that deken should not pollute your
> ~/pd/extra/ folder.
> but i wonder whether there is not a more elegant way to solve this issue.
> 
> the first question is, whether this is really a general problem or just
> a very specific problem to *your* workflow (that is, most people happen
> to do their everyday work on the canoncial upstream source of Pd and
> therefore won't ever run the risk of publishing a new shiny release of
> Pd with an illegitimate library in extra/). if this is the case, then we
> could probably just add some simple blacklisting mechanism in the
> deken-config that excludes ~/pd/extra/ on miller puckettes eeePC.
> 
> otoh, the extra/ folder of the running Pd instance is probably not a
> good place to install stuff too in *most* circumstances (the only reason
> i can think of is that someone is assembling their own
> Pd-bundled-with-externals).
> since this path is usually the very last in the list of default search
> paths, we could easily remove this element instead.
> 
I probably have a very twisted vision of how people use Pd... around UCSD
people often have 2 or 3 different versions of Pd on their machines and
as far as I know the only way to disambiguate which extern goes with
which version is to use pd/extra. 

OTOH, if it's just me, I don't see anything wrong with just hoping I
can remember to hit the "choose directory" button before ever downloading
anything.  I imagine this is shooting more people than just me in
our feet but I'd be happy to learn that I was wrong :)

And/or, just have it check if the username is "msp" and special-case me :)
M
> 
> oh, and for completeness sake:
> the "current" (before miller's changes today) behaviour was, that deken
> has a [select dir] button, where the user can change the install
> directory before they download/install any library (or change the
> directory after installing freeverb and before installing moocow).
> however, this is an opt-in feature.
> 
> 
> mfgards
> IOhannes
> 
> 




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