[PD] New users and external path struggles

[Christof Ressi]

Hey Alex, thanks for your great work!

personally, I'm not sure about the last paragraph on p. 9, though:

> As mentioned, externals are usually installed in one of the Standard
> Paths. Having externals in a Relative Path is uncommon, this usually
> happens only when a patch is provided with abstractions in the same folder 

having externals relative to a patch is not so uncommon and IMHO also good practice for self-contained projects which should work out of the box.

> "User added search paths" are not the same as a "standard path", I agree. 
> Hopefully that's clear in my documentation. That's also 
> something I suspect is causing many confusion, which would be a notion that a 
> "user added search path" would be exactly the same as a "standard path", but it isn't.

user added search paths are indeed a bit confusing. I think a big difference is the fact that you can't have relative paths to a user added search path via [declare]. 
Let's say I added the search path 'C:/Pd/libs' with a folder 'mylib' containing foo.pd.
I can do [mylib/foo] but I can't do [declare -stdpath mylib] and then just [foo] 
because - as you said - it's not a standard path.

anyway, your guide will be really helpful for beginners! 

Christof

Gesendet: Samstag, 29. Juli 2017 um 20:36 Uhr
Von: "Alexandre Torres Porres" <porres at gmail.com>
An: "Jesse Mejia" <jmejia at anestheticaudio.com>, "pd-list at lists.iem.at" <pd-list at lists.iem.at>
Betreff: Re: [PD] New users and external path struggles

Thanks for your input. This is a recurring topic that me and others have pointed. I've made simple suggestions that'd take care of most of this, including one of yours, but found resistance. 
 
Now, some of the feedback, unexpectedly, led me to suspect much of the resistance comes from not actually getting the issue in the first place! Thus, an underlying issue may be that there's not a clear picture and consensus about Pd's fundamental structure. So perhaps that needs to be sorted out before aiming for improvements.
 
To be more specific, you mention issues related to Pd's current "Standard Paths", given that it is clear to you that this is the best practice for externals. Surprisingly, that is not a consensus between developers.

Hence, I when posting my documentation in the other thread (linked here[https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2017-07/119753.html]), I opened it up for discussion to see if what I had there was in fact a consensus or not. Namely, if "Standard Paths" were the canonical way of installing externals or not. So far, 5 of us agree it is and share this same view. Nonetheless, believe me, not everyone shares it. But I'm hopeful we'll sort it out one way or another. It's to the interest of all.
 
 

2017-07-29 14:35 GMT-03:00 <jmejia at anestheticaudio.com[mailto:jmejia at anestheticaudio.com]>:

I understand that users can add a path like this manually - but that's an additional hurdle - and since deken is so tightly integrated, it doesn't seem like that should be necessary. It also causes confusion when you move paths across systems.

 
"User added search paths" are not the same as a "standard path", I agree. Hopefully that's clear in my documentation. That's also something I suspect is causing many confusion, which would be a notion that a "user added search path" would be exactly the same as a "standard path", but it isn't.
 
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