Some have had a reflex in recent changes to Pd, namely Pd now suggest to create a location to download stuff to and also automatically adds it to the path mechanism. Deken can also add folders to the path.
I think this is a great progress and we finally have it sorted, once and for all. Good! But... there is still some remaining mess we have to sort out, and I'm hoping that after so much that has been done we can keep the pace and finish it.
I'm talking about something that came as a surprise to me, and that I still think can throw a lot of people off. I had this idea that Pd had previously defined paths (named "standard paths") that were the
"right" location to install externals to. Mostly because
puredata.info has a section saying there is where you should install externals. But, as it turns out, Miller is saying he only intended "Standard Path" to be the "extra" folder in Pd. And actually, if you read the manual, you'll see that "Standard Path" is only referred to as the "extra" folder, and there is no mentioning of a "user-specific standard path" that depends on the operating system (such as ~/Library/Pd in Mac). Hence, this is not an oficial way, a right way, and seems to me it's actually "wrong", if anything.
I don't know how that expansion of the "Standard Paths" happened to Pd Vanilla, I'm guessing this was a thing for Pd-Extended, and somehow got into Vanilla in a way that Miller missed it, or confused it to be the place for system files - which is a different folder: (~/Library/Preferences).
Anyway, now we have to discuss what to do. I think we should just remove such paths as "standard paths", instead of adding something to the manual saying there also this unsupported thing we decided it is not the way to do things... so we should not use it anymore.
So, I opened a new Pull Request and I hope this is brought to the attention of everyone on this list, as I think this is an important issue. Y'all can check it out at:
https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/183 and share some thoughts here or there.