The reason why I believe combining all of these will not be feasible is because in one of my recent conversations with Miller (and Miller please correct me if I somehow misremember here) he expressed his belief any project that exceeds N lines of code which I believe in this case it was something like 10000, it becomes unmaintainable and dies. Supposedly current pd codebase is at about 60 percent of that. That same code also lacks a lot of basic facilities like infinite undo and other core tools necessary for any kind of basic editing (given the nature of pd's structure it needs to exist inside the engine itself that is also responsible for stacking order). Features that have been added in pd-l2ork have added at least a couple of thousand lines of code with the externals and everything else obviously going well beyond that. As a result even if we prune the code and make a libpd which again implies Miller is okay with that (as in abandoning his version and building a new GUI app that interfaces with libpd), it is unknown whether we are going to be able to remain under the threshold required to meet Miller's goals. Personally I feel like Miller's wisdom should not be taken lightly but at the same time I prefer to choose the path of experimentation because it has proven so far very useful to me and therefore I would prefer to continue to run with it knowing very well that at some point in the future I just may hit a brick wall because I did not listen to his advice. In other words I am taking that risk because current benefits in my view far outweigh shortcomings and also because I expect to learn a lot in the process which will make any potential dead end look more like a crossroad. In my own work I simply do not have the luxury of time required for pd/extended to catch up with even half of the features that pd-l2ork currently offers. HTH On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 2:58 PM, Rafael Vega email.rafa@gmail.com wrote:
It's been fascinating for me to see what has happened with OpenFrameworks
and their "Do it with others" philosophy. It would be great if the Pd community would migrate into something similar.
What's interesting to me is that we had a similar issue in OpenFrameworks a couple of years ago. As the community grew, more and more people wanted to contribute but there was a lack of focus and the priorities of the project were hidden by the core devs. We've had a couple of developer conferences/meetups where decisions were made on how to best handle the needs of the core people who started the project while opening up overall development to capitalize on the experience of others outside of the core group.
I must admit there were times where I wanted to fork OF or split off development in some other way, but instead I decided to knuckle down and see if we could work things out. I think it's worth a try in Pd. Even if it takes a bunch of work up front, it will be worth it in the long run.
It's been an involved social process but, overall, we are moving ahead quite well. There is a public roadmap, community action leaders (audio, 3d, graphics, linux, etc), a robust forum, etc. GitHub has been amazing helpful in this area is probably one of the main tools that makes this collaboration possible.
There have been missteps and there are still issues to resolve, but we're getting there. For instance, there will be a Documentation sprint at CMU in a few weeks.