On Tuesday, Mar 16, 2004, at 03:49 America/New_York, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, thewade hat gesagt: // thewade wrote:
One: What dictates which externels get included in the pd OFFICAL release? For example pd has netsend and netrecieve, but I saw that somebody said that OSC is used for that as well; who decides when OSC does this better than netsend and netrecieve? I have no idea of what OSC is, im just using that as an example.
netsend/netreceive aren't really externals, they are internals because they are compiled into your pd executeably right from the start.
Miller decides, what becomes an internal in Pd.
There is not much advantage in having lots of externals in Pd this way. For example, OSC had some small bugs (like "the negative float bug") that were possible to fix really fast in the Pd cvs. There is be no waiting time until there would be if OSC was in an official Pd version.
However I still do think, that in this specific case OSC should in the end be an internal part of main Pd, because OSC is such an important protocol for network communication between apps.
With the distribution packages gaining in popularity, the distinction between 'internal' and 'external' is blurring. We have Debian .debs, a Windows installer, a MacOS X installer, and PlanetCCRMA .rpms (if only these where in the CVS...). All of these have a substantial amount of 'external' code, but you could only tell what's external by researching it. Personally, I use a lot of 'externals' without even thinking about whether they'll be available since they are in the packages on all the platforms that I use.
.hc