Well, funny this was mentioned here, cause I was actually thinking about creating a library of abstractions myself.

I've been working on an extensive computer music tutorial with Pd over the years now (in portuguese though, with over 220 patches now), and I usually present a vanilla alternative when I present externals. I mean, the whole idea of the thing is to show how to implement stuff, so I sometimes even go as far as presenting a vanilla implementation of some vanilla objects.

I'm very interested in this thread because of this work, by the way. Because the tutorial has been stuck to Pd Extended 0.42-5 :P in Pd Extended 0.43 [cartopol~] and [poltocar~] did break so I say it's not compatible to it. I wanted to include some of the vanilla 0.46 functionality too by the way. Well, I digress.

I surely value compiled objects as I think they can run faster and everything, but I could work on the abstractions. I can still think of many many external objects I couldn't live without in regards to this "tutorial". Not only many objects, but maybe most importantly some GUI features like [envgen] / [breakpoints~] / [grid]. And those gotta be externals, right.

Well. Anyway. I'd be glad to come up with a library of abstractions as a side part of this work I've been developing.

If you wanna have a look at it, even though you don't speak portuguese, here it is: https://sites.google.com/site/porres/ComputacaoMusical-Porres.zip

that's the current version I uploaded for this month, but I'm already working on a new release for next month.

Cheers

2014-12-22 9:16 GMT-02:00 Alessio Degani <alessio.degani@ymail.com>:

On 22/12/2014 08:55, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:

[CUT]

Btw-- are there poisonous spiders lurking in the Pd-extended makefiles? Just reading this thread and seeing alternatives like "let's just port apt to some proprietary OSes" seems odd to me...

That's a lot of work... I think.
A more feasible way is, for example, an hybrid approach. The user downloads the desired extension/abstraction binary archive (i.e. zip, tar, ...) and then, that can be installed by simply drag'n'drop it to the pd main window (or any "install extensions" window). The installation process can be as symple as extracting the archive in to a user-specific folder (i.e. ~/.pd-extensions/) without root/admin permissions.

So I guess I'll add my own idea to this mix: how about replacing every single external binary with an abstraction? Then the external libs become portable without having to compile a single thing. Plus any Pd user willing to click the object can potentially fix bugs or make improvements.

That's a good idea! Intrinsically cross-platform and plus, each non-developer-pd-user can contribute itself to maintain the extensions... that means that the effective numbers of maintainers/developers grows exponentially! :)

Sure, you can't do Gem and some of the fancy stuff, but those are details.

Yes... that's the main concern about this approach...

Alessio

This would also increase the incentives for doing development to the core which makes abstractions faster.

-Jonathan

-- a.
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