On Sat, 2015-09-26 at 05:25 -0700, Miller Puckette wrote:
My reason for suggesting putting them in "pd/extra" is that you already put "pd" somewhere (and presumably chose where to put it) and if you relocate pd later the extra files will follow. Also, you can then have different versions of Pd with different libraries loaded.
I see your point. Such an organization is practical for someone who works on Pd related projects, I means it's quite a developer centric view. I'd like to consider a user centric view, too: Tom wants to play with a patch created by Alice. Alice doesn't know what how the users of her patches install Pd (they might run it directly from the compilation folder or they install Pd system-wide through the official repositories of their distribution), she just specifies the list of the externals her patch uses. Tom isn't familiar with how Pd search paths work, but he manages to install all required dependencies to make Alice' patch work when given quick instructions how to do it from the Pd GUI.
Things are tremendously easier if sensible defaults that work out-of-the-box automatically are chosen. I think having an automatically created (hidden) pd directory somewhere in $HOME makes life a lot easier for quite a common use case.
Roman