The good news is after many years I'm finally going to finish my undergraduate degree, and my wife and I bought a house. The bad news is there hasn't been a pure-data.org update for too long, and I haven't made much sound in the last half a year.

I finally have some time to devote to this. I'm working on the long overdue update to the web site. Part of it is a collection of links to stray externals, all of which are really great. There are getting to be so many of them, the situation is getting out of hand. Not to get too ambitious, but I'd like to propose a new software distribution of Pd called "impure data". It would bundle externals with the specific version of Pd that they work best with. As MSP absorbs externals into the main distribution, they could disappear from the impure data distribution. I envision impure data to also contain a library of useful patches, like "alternate" and "once".

I have no access to win32 machines. Someone with a win32 compiler would have to compile and/or tweak the distribution to work on that platform. Same for SGI. It's been years since I've run a compiler on one.

You can help me get your external or external library into impure data by doing the following:

1. Release the source code under the GPL, LGPL, or other OSI approved

license. See http://www.opensource.org for the OSI definition.

2. Put the source code in a directory named "foobar-1.1" where foobar is

the name of your external or library and 1.1 is the version. In that directory should be a "configure" script such that I can run "./configure --help" and see what's going on. There should also be a Makefile that builds the software without being given any arguments.

3. "make install" should put the .pd_linux files that result from "make"

in "$(PREFIX)/lib/pd/extra". Documentation for externals should be entirely in the form of patches and be installed in "$(PREFIX)/lib/pd/doc/5.reference". Higher level documentation or general example patches can go in "$(PREFIX)/lib/pd/doc/7.stuff/foobar" where foobar is like it was in 2) above.

4. Publish a .tar.gz file of your patch named like "foobar-1.1.tar.gz".

Put it somewhere that won't keep changing. Send me the URL, and send me email directly when you publish a new version.

I'm not sure what to do about GEM and Framestein. GEM is huge and seems to require compile time tweaking for particular 3D platforms. Framestein, although open source, is windows-only due to being implemented in delphi (?). I welcome comments regarding how these may be integrated.

Now off to see what has been developing on the pd-wiki.

(jfm3)