Hello Tim,
I've been tweaking a pd-extended Gentoo ebuild for personal use for
the last few weeks. It makes more sense to me to package extensions
etc. (maybe just "addons" more generally) separately.
Actually I now wonder, why even have pd-extended? It seems that it may
be doing to much of the packagers' work for them. Logically,
pd-extended is only a meta-package (right?) and may best be left to
packagers to implement, so Anderson can do it the way he wants to, I
can do it the way I want to, etc. so as to best accommodate the very
different packaging systems across all distributions.
I understand the motivation for pd-extended is to just fork to a
stable version. Is this the only reason? Why not just release stable,
numbered versions of each external?
I have not talked to him, but I think the guy that maintains the
pd-overlay has stopped maintaining the pd-extended ebuild but still
maintains pd-devel and individual live svn ebuilds of the externals. I
was tempted to chop up the pd-extended ebuild in a similar fashion,
and number the externals with the pd-extended version, like
zexy-0.41.4 but this seems repulsive to have two different "version
spaces," if you will.
I may also look at gstreamer for inspiration. They release multiple
plugins in three packages according to stability. gst-plugins-good
-bad and -ugly.
Naturally as someone on a non-Debian system, I would not want to see
it done the Debian-way on the pd-side. I would want to see something
modular and adaptable to any system (which is not unheardof). As I
have said, I like Anderson's idea of pd-zexy pd-pidip distributed as
separate tarballs, but I would leave it to Anderson to carve out his
own puredata-dev from a standard build. (So I guess in the case of the
-dev package I would favor the overwhelmingly conventional over the
modular solution from pd's side.)
Modularity is the magic word for me. I find myself deconstructing the
pd-extended autobuild system in my ebuild.
Disclaimer: I have written a few ebuilds for personal use and fixed a
few broken ones, but I am otherwise not a terribly experienced writer
of ebuilds. I am not a software engineer and have never released my
own source package. Nor have I even been a Pd user for long. Maybe, I
know nothing.
p.s., OT: why are so many externals' *-help.pd files copied to both
$objectsdir and $helpdir?? Why copy the same file to two different
places? If absolutely necessary, symlinks would be preferred.