hi,
last night i had to restart Pd a couple of times while loading a largish patch and found that the startup took incredibly long.
after ruling out the largish-patch, i found that the actual cause of the slow-startup was deken (the plugin), which runs a bit of code to determine whether it is running on a Debian-based system (so it will also search for apt-installable packages).
While this check (`lsb_release`) usually runs reasonably fast (that's why i didn't detect any problems earlier), it seems that sometimes it does not.
so after a little though i now think that the "apt" search backend in deken should probably be removed from the built-in deken (Pd>=0.47).
reasoning: first of all i still think that the apt-functionality is a great feature (hey, i wrote it!) however, the target audience are users who installed Pd via apt. this rules out all OSX, W32 and fedora users (in these cases, the potentially slow test will most likely return much earlier due to a "command not found"; nevertheless it does require some ressources (forking away a shell) and therefore slows down the boot-process). as it is now, the apt-backend is currently mandatory (on Debian-based systems): i believe in choice, so there ought to be a way to disable. finally: the apt-functionality has been implemented as a test bed for extensible deken-backends. the idea is, that deken provides a little API that any search backend could use. afaict, this API is simple and stable (both the default puredata.info-search and the apt-search are actually "plugins" to deken).
so my idea is to have the apt-backend removed from pd/deken altogether, and then have the puredata Debian package install that functionality via an plugin by default (e.g. a Debian package "pd-deken-apt"). this would keep the current feature for all users, but allow Debian users to disable it, and not slow down users of non-Debian based system at all. if the apt-search functionality was provided via a Debian package, one could also skip the test for Debian.
this requires two things: - (obviously) remove the apt-backend from the built-in deken - apply [patch#556], since any deken-backends must be loaded *after* deken has beein initialized - which currently is impossible as deken loads after all external plugins.
i will add a patch for the 1st issue to [patch#556] and pray for inclusion...
gfmasdr IOhannes