[PD] Deken library management. Was: [pdconv16_r] Topics: Deken/Core Objects/Website/Community Involvement

[Derek Kwan]

> It would help the discussion if there was an inventory of actual problems
> the metadata would solve. There was a discussion about this on the Github
> deken-list, which (probably) went nowhere because of this.

This metadata would potentially solve issues with updates (I'll discuss
this later) and just general ease-of-use. Deken as it is right now, you
pretty much have to know the name of the library you want to install,
and what it does/what it contains. As a new user, I'd find that pretty
daunting. I don't know what external libraries are there for Pd, I don't
know what any of them do, I don't know when they were last updated so I
don't know how old these libraries are. Even as an experienced user, maybe
I'll forget which libraries have sample-length delays, or bandlimited
oscillators or limiters (you don't need to tell me this, I already know =P) 

At least with pd-extended, everything was just there and you could dig through
the Pd browser. In a post-extended world, we're just throwing users into the deep
end and hoping for the best. At least in my experience, I've seen a lot of
people asking how to install x library or wondering what library they
can download for some certain functionality, and a lot of people just
resorting to pd-extended because it's easier. I think as contributing
members to the Pd community, it's our job (or at least it'd be nice) to
make things easier for newcomers. Heck, even in the pd-extended era, it
was kinda hard to tell what all the libraries did and what object
classes they had just from the sheer scale of it all.

Taking a page from Processing, the Contribution Manager has a filter
search where you can look up keywords, the version number, a short
description of what the library does, and the author. Additionally, you
can install, update, and also remove from the same window. Like if I
type in "audio" into the filter, the list that used to display all the
libraries is just displaying Beads, Loom, and Minim. There's also a
dropdown menu to sort by category, such as Animation, GUI, Hardware,
etc.

Thus, I'd propose: a list of keywords for the library (including object
class names), version number, category (if applicable), author, and a
short description. 


> With the current update policy of Pd-vanilla (add new functionality without
> breaking the existing one), not much issues arise between the core and
> externals. The best strategy for building externals is to anticipate
> differences in vanilla versions, implement workarounds if possible or fail
> gracefully if needed.

I suppose I'm more concerned about updates to external libraries so it
migth be a little off-topic =). But here's a case, say I have library x
v 2.0 and it's buggy as heck and a v3.0 happens to get uploaded. One
nice thing would be to have Deken tell me about that (esp if I have
something like 20 libraries installed on my computer, it gets kinda hard
to keep track of it all) but perhaps more importantly and realistically,
I'd like to be able to download the update without having to mess with
the current installation and not have to worry about duplicates. I'm
just trying to think of smarter library management in a post-extended
world and I suppose I'm thinking of pd-l2ork too and how to go about if
one library gets updated inbetween pd-l2ork versions, but this also
applies to using Pd Vanilla as well.

> A version number would be a good idea, but how many external-packages depend
> on other entities than Pd-vanilla? Having more information available before
> downloading would be nice, and this could already be implemented as an
> extended deken-plugin.
> 
> Debian packages also have dependencies listed, but that is quite a different
> scale of complexity.
> 
> Without some actual problems, it will be hard to devise a solution to solve
> them.

Here's a case: Say I have this piece that requires library1,
library2,... up to libraryn that are all avaliable compiled for various
platforms on deken. I'm on linux and I want to share this piece with a
group of people who are on MacOS, Windows, Raspberry Pi's, etc. What's
the best way to go about this? Potentially I can just include the
binaries for every single platform and have one thing I can ship out, I
can on my own make platform independent distributions and make those
available, or potentially a third option (my proposed idea), have a
package manifest with a list of the libraries and their build versions,
and have deken handle the versioning and platform-specific binaries by
handing the package manifest over to deken like how you can use a
package.json file in a node.js project to contact a central repository
and download everything with their proper versions via npm install.
Especially if these patches with library dependencies I want to
distribute are didactic material, I want it to be as easy and painless
as possible, almost as easy as downloading pd-extended in the past.

For the local vs global install issue , maybe this piece requires library3
v2.0 and doesn't work with the current library3 v3.0 because something broke.
I want to be able to use library3 v2.0 with this piece but I don't want to
screw up my Pd install and have both versions in my general Pd
searchpaths (there would also be potential nameclashes with the
the old and new objects but ignoring that for now... =P). Also maybe I use
the majority of the libraries with only this one piece only so I don't want
globally install these libraries.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry if none of this made sense, a bit sleep-deprived and it's late
=) I think my updates argument was the weakest one and I'll have to
think about that more... And I suppose this discussion kinda is
tangentially related to pd-vanilla development, but Deken is a part of
the Pd Vanilla distribution now and I think library management in a
post-extended world is a worthwhile topic.

-- 
Derek Kwan
www.derekxkwan.com