Object lists

Sometimes the user only knows the object they need, not the library. Therefore, a search initiated via the deken-plugin (Pd's package manager) also searches for objects. For this to work, the infrastructure must know which objects are contained in a library; this is done via an objectlist file.

The objectlist file consists of exactly one line per object, with the object-name at the beginning, followed by a TAB (\t) and a short (single-line) description of the object.

frobnofy    frobfurcate a bugle of numbers
frobnofy~   signal frobfurcation

The objectlist file has the same name as the package with a .txt appended. E.g. if your library is called frobnozzel(Windows-i386-32)(Sources).dek, the objectlist file would have the name frobnozzel(Windows-i386-32)(Sources).dek.txt This file must be uploaded to the same directory as the .dek file.

deken will try to automatically generate an objectlist file for a package. It looks for all "*-help.pd" files in the library directory, and creates an entry in the objectlists for each. The short description is taken from the DESCRIPTION comment in the [pd META] subpatch within the help-patch. If no DESCRIPTION comment can be found, a generic description is used.

You can provide your own (manually maintained) objectlist file via the --objects flag:

$ deken package --objects mylist.txt my_external

To prevent the creation/use of an objectlist file, pass an empty string

$ deken package --objects "" my_external

In general, it is preferable if the description of the object in the META subpatch is included in the object's help file (and let deken generate the objectlist from it), as this allows others (humans, Pd, plugins, ...) to access the same information as well.