I'm now forking the thread :)

Em qua., 6 de out. de 2021 às 12:41, IOhannes m zmoelnig <zmoelnig@iem.at> escreveu:

On 10/6/21 4:46 PM, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as I see it, Pd-Extended started as a
> "distro", then it evolved to a proper fork with parallel/independent
> development.

not really.

Pd-extended was *always* closely related to the development of
Pd-vanilla, adding some patches on top of it.
hans was eager to bring back improvements to the vanilla development,
but with some things it was obvious that miller won't accept them.

Hmmm, ok, this is important for me to clarify. I'm now searching more throughly the list records, cause I first had searched it and found mentionings of an "extended distro", for reference, see: https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2003-02/009772.html . This referred to a "pd 0.36 extended (CVS)" is the first "extended of some sort" version I saw being announced on the Pd list (from 2002, by Adam Lindsay) => https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2002-12/008950.html

Since this referred to a mac version, I can only assume it wasn't the first one :) I guess Pd was more easily accessible to Linux users that knew their way around, and that the "extended" project was a "CVS version" with extra stuff that you could build yourself. Another email talks about building it for windows that says "to my great suprise, the pd-0.36-extended2 package off sourceforge compiles under windows with a minimum of effort" => https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2003-03/010635.html . Please enlighten me on the birth of extended, I'd love to hear how it started, and also why it was referred to as "the CVS version".

The puredata.info site only has pd extended 0.38 as the "first" version, but I'm assuming this was when the project was in a more advanced and consolidated phase see => https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2005-05/028529.html . For the record, I'm assuming 0.36 was the first version, am I correct?

I found a thread about extended 0.37 (see: https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2003-05/011593.html) and let me quote it:

"Now that the majority of the usability enhancements have gone
"mainstream," (yay! thanks, Miller!) I see little reason to make Mac
users use a forked version."

So yeah, I can now see that from its very inception, Extended started off as a 'fork' of some sort, but not aimed at a distinct evolutionary line, and more as a parallel development branch, aimed to facilitate the distribution of Pd and its main externals, and also serving as a testbed (as previously mentioned). So, ok, no, it wasn't just "Pd distributed with externals".

But some things are still unclear to me, like how things worked for Linux, for instance, when talking about "extended" Hans mentions "0.37-test7 is in Debian already, along with a lot of externals from the CVS. The packages are called puredata, pd-externals, pd-cyclone, pd-osc, pd-zexy." reference: https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2003-10/014125.html - so, how would you install extended on Linux then?

thanks