--- On Tue, 2/15/11, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca Subject: Re: [PD] FLOSS book Lists chapter To: "Jonathan Wilkes" jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: "Hans-Christoph Steiner" hans@eds.org, pd-list@iem.at Date: Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 7:19 PM On Sun, 13 Feb 2011, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
As well as in svn, where, for example, list-abs is in
the abstractions folder, but there are plenty of libraries in "externals" that are made up only of abstractions.
That might because it's forbidden for any externals to be in the abstractions folder. I once tried to include 1 % of C code in an abstractions library I had put in abstractions/ , and was told I had to move it out. Preventively, people can put abstractions libraries in externals/ so that they never have to move them.
Does that seem like an accurate hypothesis ?
Yes.
What else would be a reason to put those libraries in externals/ ?
I say that even though at the implementation
level, abstractions aren't classes, for the user, it works like a class. Also there are many externals that don't include abstractions but are nonetheless compatible with Pd vanilla.
What part of the text are you referring to, in
particular ?
The last sentence states that list-abs "doesn't
require any externals so that it is compatible with vanilla Pd as well".
Yeah, that's nonsense. Pd-vanilla is the origin of the <m_pd.h> interface for making externals.
Btw-- the manual makes a distinction between "abstractions" and "externs".
The idea of Vanilla-without-externals is probably most useful to ZenGarden users, who can't compile any existing externals, because ZenGarden was designed to be incompatible with Pd-Vanilla. It is because of this incompatibility, that Zengarden users are led to excessively focus on what's compatible with Vanilla-without-Externals, because that's all that the ZenGarden project aims to support.
Just another hypothesis. What do you think ?
I think it's useful to people doing stuff with audio who want to learn Pd without being surrounded by a haze of thousands of possibly useful, possibly buggy, poorly documented object classes that may or may not be usable for someone on a different machine. The danger, however, is that one can end up arbitrarily limiting the types of projects one does to a narrow subset that fit the types of tools available with "Pd-minus-externals"*. Then again maybe the limited set of tools is what attracts that user in the first place...
- "Puritan Data"?
-Jonathan
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC