Michael McGonagle said this at Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:38:38 -0600:

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into Externals, and help patches into Help.) That, however, would require a strong, top-down convention for marking the locations and destinations of the externals and help patches.

Adam, this is one of those things that could be hard to implement, with PD being cross-platform. On the other hand, it would not be a difficult thing in your distribution to setup these standard locations.

Well, it would be nice to do this in a way where scripts across platform can take advantage of it. I was imagining a couple files (named ".EXTERNALS" and ".HELP", I suppose) along the lines of:

.EXTERNALS: location: ./vasp vasp pd/*.pd

.HELP: location: . pd-help/*.pd

The first line gives the destination location (in relation to the pd/ extras or doc/5.reference) directory, and the following lines give the locations of the files to be moved. (I suppose default .pd_linux, .dll, etc. suffixes should be omitted.)

Is this any more useful than "install" rules in a makefile? I think so, but it might seem like a marginal difference at first. Unlike many install rules, this doesn't assume anything about absolute paths (or even relative paths--some rules for externals make assumptions about which directory the external is *made* in).

Is this sort of explicit marking needed? I think so. I did some mini- experiments, to see if it was possible to guess the difference between help files and abstractions. It's really hard, even with a human in the loop, sometimes.

Thoughts? adam