On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 08:32:46PM +0200, IOhannes m zmölnig wrote:
On 05/04/2016 11:53 PM, Miller Puckette wrote:
I believe it should be just the one. But I'm a scope conservative (despite the contradictory evidence that Pd has, in fact, no scoping mechanism :)
hmm, so: for your people at UCSD you would like to have externals installed into ~/pd/extra and ~/pd-0.46-4/extra and ~/pd-0.22/extra depending on which version of Pd you are running. for yourself, you would like to have externals NOT be installed into ~/pd/extra.
since these two behaviours are contradictory and cannot be resolved automatically, the only option is to ask the user every single time they are going to install a library via deken, at the potential cost ofthem shouting "but i told you this directory already three times this morning" at their computers.
On 08/05/16 11:12, Miller Puckette wrote:
Well, another way migth be to have Pd only query the first time in a Pd session and then proceed automatically.
Speaking as a fellow "scope conservative" I know that it is possible to cater for all of the above cases where a user might want a different install and loading paths for externals, because it has already been solved by other scripting languages such as Python.
Consider the following selection of different install-path use cases:
- User has root and wants to install an external to some location,
available to all instances of Pd on the system (system administrator).
- User does not have (or want to use) root, uses [one of several]
pre-built binaries of Pd in their homedir and they want to install different externals for the exclusive use of each one.
- User does not have (or want to use) root, uses system Pd or other Pds
and wants to install externals available to all.
- User wants to install an external for use by a single patch only so
they can zip up that patch with all it's dependencies and send it to a gallery for deployment on an identical architecture machine. They don't want the external polluting all copies of Pd.
In Python for example, you would use a virtualenv (or nodeenv in node) for the local case (4) and different flags to pip/easy_install for cases 1-3.
In Pd, I don't think it's hard to come up with a UI that satisfies all of these possibilities, with a sensible default setting (such as saving to "~/pd-externals").
Imagine the current deken interface, but with one extra pull-down with the label "install to:" and the following selection:
- ~/pd-externals/ (default)
- /path/to/current/pd/extras (if root is required some message is shown)
- /path/to/currently/selected/patch/directory
The second and third options would obviously be dynamic.
It would probably also make sense for the pull-down to default to the last selected value when changed.
I should have submitted a pull-request instead of this email, sorry about that!
Cheers,
Chris