On Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 02:06:52PM -0500, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Which has bitten me on the ass at least once when making music with someone who uses pd-extended. Hans, I wonder if you could make it
clear to people who download pd-extended that it is incompatible with Pd, an older version, and that it is bundled with many externals which aren't in Pd by default?Note that I really appreciate all the work you are doing to make
people's lives easier, and don't want to put a dent in your efforts. I just
think if we're not careful with breaking compatability people are going
to get very confused very quickly.Correct me if I am wrong, but using Pd-extended vs Pd-vanilla of the
same version is no more incompatible than using Pd-vanilla 0.40 vs.
0.39. If you use [declare] in a patch in pd-vanilla 0.40, then it
won't work in pd-vanilla 0.39. If you use [atan2] in Pd-vanilla 0.37
then it won't be compatible with pd-vanilla 0.38, and vice-versa.
If you change the behaviour of something as fundemental as [select] in pd-extended and it doesn't get changed in Pd, then the patches and libraries I write under Pd won't work properly in pd-extended.
You are correct though, if I recall correctly the specific problem I had with someone using pd-extended was when I tried to show them something that only works in 0.40. I had to get them to download the latest in order to get my abstraction to work. Which is fine - I guess you can't be expected to track the latest Pd exactly.
Pd-extended 0.39 is basically like half way between pd-vanilla 0.39
and 0.40 since it includes patches that get included in 0.40, but
doesn't include miller's 0.40 changes.
Got it.
This is the reason why I made the [hcs/version] object, you can issue
a warning if someone is using your patch with a version not tested or
known to be incompatible. It's not in Pd-vanilla, I never submitted
it to the patch tracker since I wasn't sure of the best interface for
it, like maybe it should be a message like [;pd version(, then you
listen on [receive pd]-[route version] for the response.
Might be a good idea if it acheives widespread use.
Best,
Chris.