On 22/12/2014 08:55, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

[CUT]

Btw-- are there poisonous spiders lurking in the Pd-extended makefiles? Just reading this thread and seeing alternatives like "let's just port apt to some proprietary OSes" seems odd to me...

That's a lot of work... I think.
A more feasible way is, for example, an hybrid approach. The user downloads the desired extension/abstraction binary archive (i.e. zip, tar, ...) and then, that can be installed by simply drag'n'drop it to the pd main window (or any "install extensions" window). The installation process can be as symple as extracting the archive in to a user-specific folder (i.e. ~/.pd-extensions/) without root/admin permissions.

So I guess I'll add my own idea to this mix: how about replacing every single external binary with an abstraction? Then the external libs become portable without having to compile a single thing. Plus any Pd user willing to click the object can potentially fix bugs or make improvements.

That's a good idea! Intrinsically cross-platform and plus, each non-developer-pd-user can contribute itself to maintain the extensions... that means that the effective numbers of maintainers/developers grows exponentially! :)

Sure, you can't do Gem and some of the fancy stuff, but those are details.

Yes... that's the main concern about this approach...

Alessio

This would also increase the incentives for doing development to the core which makes abstractions faster.

-Jonathan

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a.