[PD] why not Purr Data?

[Roman Haefeli]

On Mon, 2017-10-02 at 09:29 -0400, Ali Momeni wrote:
> thanks everyone, this is really helpful.
> 
> in light of your experiences, it seems like the best of all worlds
> might be to use a modern computer/os with Purr Data for editing, make
> sure to stick with vanilla only objects, and use vanilla for
> deploying.  

By forking Pure Data and adding incompatible changes, the devs of Purr
Data created another ecosystem parallel to the Pure Data ecosystem and
I think it's not that easy to make your works/patches cover both
ecosystems. There is no guarantee your patches created in Purr Data
will work in Pure Data and vice versa. So, yes, I do see potential
pitfalls there. I'd say for the sake of your sanity it's probably wiser
to stick with one or the other, since both have features that the other
hasn't. 

Many of my patches that I developed on Pure Data don't run without
modification in Purr Data. Some crash at loading, some look graphically
weird. Probably it wouldn't take such a big effort to make them work in
Purr Data. However, I decided to stick with the Pure Data ecosystem
leave Purr Data aside. My feeling is Pure Data still has a larger user
base, more developers involved working on it and covers more versatile
use cases (assuming libpd is considered part of the Pure Data
ecosystem). Pure Data doesn't need a monolithic distribution since it
has Deken, which is in my opinion a sensible way of dealing with
distribution of externals.

That said, Purr Data is an impressive piece of work, it looks nice, is
very easy to install and is also really nice to use. And I can somehow
understand why things are how they are now and why it became  different
from  and incompatible with Pure Data. But still, in my ideal world
both would be just flavors of the very same core and people wouldn't be
forced to decide for one or the other and could switch back and forth
as they please.

Just my 2 cents.

Roman 

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