Yap, in the end I put a [receive] in the patch as a workaround. I'll open a ticket on github then, I suppose this could be useful.
Just to give you a bit more context here, the reason why I'm asking for this is because I'm prototyping a test suite for Pd - ie for "continuous integration' or simply for testing new features. I wanted to contribute a bit more to the cause and since this seems to be something we're missing atm, I thought I could spend some time on this. It would be great to have some scripts in place that allow us to check new and old features, to make sure things work fine on different OSs and machines and that we haven't broken anything while working on a new feature. As a starting point we could have Pd users running the suite on their machine and share the logs/results. I'm prototyping something simple in Lua simple, that shouldn't require too much effort in terms of maintenance.
I'll open a ticket on github and share more details there.
Please, let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions/questions.
Cheers, Mario