Hallo, Matt Barber hat gesagt: // Matt Barber wrote:

Relative paths are important if you use declare in the way you described here: to make shipping "bundles" easier by putting all used abstractions into a subdirectory and adding that subdir to the searchpath of the MAIN.pd. As you don't know where a user puts your project, you cannot use absolute paths.

Now inside of an abstraction I would discern two use cases: One is using declare just as in the MAIN patch to add further subdirectories for other helper abstractions. Here the only thing that makes sense IMO when using relative paths is to have them relative to the abstraction itself.

Another use case is the path for "resources" like soundfiles or sequencer patterns. The example Miller once mentioned on pd-dev was having a [soundfiler] in a sample player abstraction. Usually this abstraction would live somewhere far away from your soundfiles or your MAIN.pd.

[soundfiler] also looks for soundfiles in the pd search path, so users may feel inclined to manipulate the path to make the sampler abstraction find wav-files in a "snd"-directory somewhere without giving the full absolute path. Here it probably is more common to use paths relative to MAIN.pd instead of sampleplayer.pd so the MAIN-file's -path setting would reach into the child patch as well.

A drum synth abstraction may be different again: Maybe it has some default samples for kick and hihat in a subdirectory next to itself. Now you could manipulate the path to make it find these samples first. Again absolute paths don't work here, as your synth.pd may be installed anywhere.

As there is no consensus which of the two path alternatives should be used inside an abstraction, -path currently is disabled completely in an abstraction. (Btw. I don't know how an abstraction knows that it's used as an abstraction, not as MAIN.pd.)

Ciao