Hi, you can still set deken to download to "extra", so it's not like the new release made this impossible. Thus, it's not like this version introduced a bug, or has something that needs to be fixed.

As I see it, you're just asking for [declare] to have a new feature added, one that would make it easy to search for libs elsewhere other than in the standard path (a.k.a. the "extra" folder) - in the case you are not using (I'll emphasize nothing is stopping you from using "extra").

So, if that's the case, I had already opened an issue and made a suggestion for exactly that! My idea is that the -path flag should also look in the paths that were added in the "path preferences". That would do the trick! Here's the issue report and its relative discussions: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/issues/184 (please nevermind the discussion on "additional standard paths", those would other folders that are not the "extra" folder, so it's not something related to what you bring up)

 
the same error goes obviously for self-declared object names that used to work so far, like

[tof/folderpanel] or
[mrpeach/packOSC] etc...

if the corresponding externals are anywhere else but in "extra"

Not at all! If you have any other externals folder set up for you and added to the path, as Pd now suggests (say ~/Pd/externals), any external folder you download to it will allow you to use this slash declaration. So either you're not doing it right, or we have a bug.

cheers