I’d also note that one reason why OF went with Github repos and an external scraper to provide the listings is that it maintains itself. People contribute and log issues with the addons directly and nobody has to manually update a list somewhere. All addon info is kept directly with the source aka documentation via the readme too.

I know puredata.info is a wiki and people have posted source code etc to it but often that info is out of date by the time I find it. This is why it can be a good idea to keep things close to the source (code).

Now I’m not saying this has to be *the way*. We standardized around using Github in OF as the project really expanded in scope and collaboration when the main OF source code was moved on it, so it was a natural fit.

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Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com

On Dec 17, 2014, at 10:41 PM, Dan Wilcox <danomatika@gmail.com> wrote:

It can be maintained. If we have a “puredata” Github organization (I made one already :D), for example, there could be an external template with the makefiles, sample readme, folder structure, metadata, etc.

This is what we do with OpenFrameworks. There is an ofxAddonTemplate that is both documentation and a template when creating a new addon. We then provide makefiles and a ProjectGenerator app that work with this layout and, if the addon is in the right place, make it relatively easy to include the external sources and libs into your project. Now, pd externals wouldn’t require a project generator but would need a makefile that find the pd sources and builds against them and/or any other required libs. Again, we can borrow form the great OF makefiles in this regard. 

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Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com

On Dec 17, 2014, at 10:33 PM, Jaime E Oliver <jaime.oliver2@gmail.com> wrote:

Hans has already put together an external template and makefiles and I’m sure we could build similar indexing site for pd-externals (or I can ask for the ofxaddons.com source code).

Is this being maintained by someone? I don't think I am able to do it, but this is crucial to teach how to write or compile externals…