On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, d wrote:
hi!
This point is actually not a problem of Pd, but one of its user base i.e. it's our problem. Dave Sabine did some terrific work on his PDDP project, but those aren't example patches ready to use. As Pd has no company behind it, this is a job for the community.
one of the problems in this context is the increasing amount of different projects and websites offering patches, code, documentation, etc. for pd. there is millers site, the iem.site, guenters works like cvs, pure-data.org, pdp, pddp , pdpdp...
there IS a lot of documentation and examples, one just has to find them. beeing a newbie and trying to find pd ressources must be a lot of work.
i think it's not a realistic idea to centralize these ressources on one page, but maybe a (more or less) complete linklist at a central location like millers page or the iem-pd page (and in the README file of the sources) with a good summary of all the projects spread over the net could help.
Starting from that, we might really discuss in detail the meta-resources that are available, how they work, which one is appreciated most, which one not and why.
I think the projects you mentioned have different goals.
pd-wiki and pure-data.org:
- Two discussion forums, link collections, everyone can contribute. --> offer information (about pd projects)
pdb:
- database for searching externals, maintenance is centralized --> information about pd projects.
pddp:
- project for improving the documentation, centralized. this is a pd project
pure-data.sf.net:
- Code repository, doesn't hold information about different projects
but physically hosts them.
In order to "organize" the webpages we could establish a pd web ring, which is something like "information about where to get information".
The CVS repository tries to tackle the problem from the root. The projects are "born" out of the CVS. This of course needs some degree of collaboration. But as CVS is made for that it should not be to hard to collaborate. Now what is needed is developers who are willing to do so.
Finally the ones who gain should be the users, who will get a bunch of externals from one address, and the developers, because testing and bug fixing can be done directly on the CVS. Of course we need to build a real community in order to achieve this, which is the hardest thing of the whole plan.
Guenter