Well, like we were discussing in the other thread, I wish to edit the puredata.info FAQ section and work on updating "how to install and load externals" bit, and also add related stuff on "how to download externals from deken"...

As part of this endeavour, I also felt like working on questions like - what is an external? What are the types of externals? what is an external library? Things we take for granted but when you sit to write it down, you start questioning the concepts...

So this is what I'm coming down to, after thinking about it...

- Internal objects: Objects that are part of Pd Vanilla’s binary 

- External objects: Objects that are NOT part of Pd Vanilla’s binary (including pd's extra objects)

- Vanilla objects: Objects that come in the Pd Vanilla distribution (which contains the internals plus a small collection of externals - the “extra” objects).

- Types of external objects: 1) Compiled binaries ; 2) Abstractions (Pd patches).

- External Library: Collection of external objects, be it abstractions; a set of separate binaries; or a single binary containing several objects.







 

2017-02-19 16:39 GMT-03:00 Dan Wilcox <danomatika@gmail.com>:
I wasn’t implying my thought process was the “correct” usage of the the terms. :) I think Miller and IOhannes are the ones to weight in.

That being said, I think it boils down to, for me, “external(s)” was short for “external library(-ies),” as in software libraries and, even if there is only 1 class or object, it’s still a “library.”

From what I understand, your coming from the Pd object side so “external” means “1 object” not part of Pd vanilla and “externals” means “multiple objects” not part of vanilla. I think that definitely makes sense and perhaps I was coming from the wrong/developer direction.

So, in short, the idea I've had so far is:

external (kinda short for "external object"): a single object not part of the Pd Vanilla distribution, either an abstraction or a compiled object 

library (kinda short for "externals library"): collection of externals.

Yeah, I think that’s probably a good way to look at it (as mentioned above).

I do like to note when a library is composed completely of abstractions, hence “abstraction library”, as it's easy to use and doesn’t require compilation.