I have a question about the current policies or best practices regarding extending Csound.
Recently, I wrote a GEN routine based on the Lorenz attractor, which I find quite useful for my artistic work. Since it has proven valuable in my projects, I believe it could also be helpful to others in the community.
However, I noticed there are several plugin repositories, like risset, that seem to exist outside the main Csound core. This made me wonder:
What criteria determine whether something becomes part of the core Csound distribution versus remaining an external plugin?
Personally, I would favour 3rd party developers maintaining their plugins as Eduardo does. The main reason is that they understand their code better than anyone else and if there are issues they can deal with them better than anyone else.
Also the number of core developers is very small and we're spread very thinly trying to maintain a large codebase. We encourage developers to participate but there's very little uptake. We're always very grateful for any help offered.
best
Prof. Victor Lazzarini
Maynooth University
Ireland
I would also encourage the idea of keeping a minimal amount of code within the core,and the rest as externals. Not only does this reduce work for core developers, but externals can have their own release schedules. Otherwise a small fix in an opcode needs a new release for users to be able to get the fix. Consider that many users of csound are actually passive/non-technical users. For my part csound is being used in installations, hardware instruments or run in the laptops of musicians who are not really able to install from source. For such cases having a solid csound installation which does not change very often and plugins which can be updated as fast as a fix is pushed is great.