The search path for loading libraries in Pd is currently quite messy and hard to figure out. This page is a place to organize ideas about how it should be structured.

Proposed Functionality

   for path in paths do -- the core does this bit
     for loader in loaders do
       loader(path, library, object)

Existing Functionality

  for loader in loaders do
    for path in paths do -- the loader does this bit
      loader(path, library, object)

Use Cases

include libs in project folder

In this example project, it uses the sssad library for state-saving as well as the sssadgui library of GUI objects that are already hooked up to sssad. The project itself depends on sssad library and the sssadgui library also depends on sssad. So the sssad lib should be shared by both:

myproject-\
          |-mypatch.pd
          |-sssad/
          |-sssadgui/

Examples from other languages

Python

• the current dir '.' is always searched first, no matter what the path: http://docs.python.org/tutorial/modules.html#the-module-search-path