Ok, these pd-externals were put together in a hurry (as almost everything regarding demudi), and it is in fact not the way to keep the things managable (there has to be a new package for every lib that has a new version ..).
It seems that the number of contributors has reached a critical mass, where we really have to do something in order to keep the "mess" that is created within bounds.
IMO the ideal solution would be to build a CVS server for externals. Together with some rules how to contribute.
A .tar.gz and zip snapshot from this can then be used for distribution, binary versions for the different platforms can be build from that.
Well, setting up such a system is a bit of work, and it can only succeed if the external developers agree to use it.
This way we could somehow try to start to have a quality control for externals, bug tracking system and the like. This should do away with the concerns Yves has about the pure-data.org site.
Lets not bitch at each other, its not jfm3's fault that external developers are as chaotic as (some of us) are.
In the current situation it is very hard to keep up with the things that are going on, jfm3 is putting a lot of his time into it, with a common effort everybody should benefit, and above all the music we want to create. (... arghh, that sounds pathetic ..)
Guenter
On 17 Apr 2002, Andrew (Andy) W. Schmeder wrote:
The Demudi folks already have! I have a debian package here called "pd-externals" and put together by Guenter Geiger, which includes a whole lot of externals: ggee, ext13, zexy, plugin~, ann,... But probably not in the newest versions, and that would be a problem for any packager:
Yeah.. I know... I've got those .debs. The problem is that they are very out of date (pd 0.33)... also there is no pd-dev package w/ appropriate headers... its just not enough to maintain a decent pd install purely within the confines of the apt- system.
Furthermore pd-externals contains a whole slew of different libraries, which is bad from the maintenance point of view, IMHO.
A good example is the xmms packages. There is no 'xmms-plugins' package, rather each plugin has its own package. Very clean that way... instead of pd-externals we should have pd-zexy, pd-ggee, pd-gem, pd-iemlib, etc. Of course not everything will be packaged nicely but the major libs could be.
Maybe when I've got time I'll stop advocating and start packaging ... but not now. ;)
think all externals are announced here. So maybe if we could agree on a new tag in the subject line instead of [announce] for external announcements like [EXTERNAL], one could automatically create a list of new externals from the mailing list archives.
Now that is a great idea!
andy