[LV2] LV2 & Patchstorage:

Fri Mar 10 05:53:34 PST 2023

Hi David,

Thank you for your extensive input!

So, as the interest in this topic is low, we are moving forward with our
initial plan - to cover our project requirements first.
If there is more interest or additional projects in need of a plugin cloud
solution, we will be more than happy to dedicate more resources to it, but
we can't tackle the whole scope all at once alone.

To note, all already uploaded plugins have links to their source code, and
donate flow is active if we manage to find a related donate URL (e.g.,
https://patchstorage.com/instrument-tuner/). We are populating all the info
ourselves, but PRs are welcome -
https://github.com/patchstorage/patchstorage-lv2-uploader/blob/main/plugins.json.
The build and publish guide is here -
https://github.com/patchstorage/patchstorage-docs/wiki/Platform:-LV2-Plugins
.

We already see the Patchstorage LV2 section rising on Google and we will
announce the Patchstorage LV2 section and the
corresponding MODEP update officially next week. Let's see where it goes
from there.

If anyone has any questions, concerns, or suggestions, just reach out to
me. And if someone wants to change how their plugin is presented on
Patchstorage, let me know too.

Thank you! Have a great weekend!

Pranciškus Jansas
Team Player at Blokas
blokas.io
community.blokas.io

[image: Blokas]
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On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 6:36 PM David Robillard <d at drobilla.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 2023-01-26 at 22:21 +0200, Pranciškus Jansas wrote:
> > Hello LV2 Community!
> > Pranciškus from Blokas/Patchstorage here. Hermann Meyer suggested
> > reaching out here.
> > Let me begin by expressing our team's gratitude for all of your work
> > that helped us bring projects like Pisound and Patchbox OS to life
> > that heavily relies on the LV2 ecosystem.
> > I am reaching out because we are in the midst of finalizing
> > https://patchstorage.com support for LV2 plugins, and I would like to
> > have a discussion with you all.
> > Although the initial idea for this integration came from the need to
> > decouple plugin builds from Patchbox OS releases in the context of
> > the MOD stack, with help from other MOD-based projects, we reached a
> > state that could benefit the entire LV2 ecosystem.
> > What we have with Patchstorage now is a proof-of-concept system that
> > allows:
> >  * LV2 plugin developers to build their plugins for different
> > platforms locally.
> >  * Publish/update multi-platform plugins to Patchstorage via CLI
> > utility.
> >  * For new/existing projects like MOD-UI, integrate Patchstorage as a
> > plugin cloud solution via Patchstorage API.
> >  * For end-users to explore, download, rate, comment on plugins, and
> > subscribe to new plugin notifications. Also, having a centralized LV2
> > library would highly increase the visibility of the entire LV2
> > standard (SEO, spill-over effect from other platforms hosted on
> > Patchstorage, 23k MAU last month).
> >  * For plugin developers to communicate directly with their users and
> > get donations from them (via any 3rd-party service). Later on, we
> > could implement Bandcamp-style “pay what you like” model.
> > You can find more info here -
> >
> https://github.com/patchstorage/patchstorage-docs/wiki/Platform:-LV2-Plugins
> > .
> > We are at the stage where we can start populating the LV2 section on
> > the site, but before doing so, we would like to discuss with you what
> > would be the best way to move forward:
> >  * Would such kind of single LV2 library/index be beneficial from
> > your point of view? What aspects/features would be most appreciated
> > by plugin developers?
>
> I'm not really a plugin developer in any real sense aside from a few
> very conservative ports, but since nobody else has weighed in yet,
> here's my two cents:
>
> The ability to easily download working LV2 plugin binaries certainly
> seems useful for users.  I don't know about developers; it depends,
> really.  A lot of FLOSS developers just don't deal with binary
> distribution whatsoever, and LV2 is no different there.  Most are used
> to packagers being other people, most commonly, OS distributions.
>
> The site seems more suited to sharing presets at first glance, which is
> a different thing from plugins themselves, and has a much lower barrier
> of entry.  LV2 presets are, for the most part, just portable data that
> doesn't have any of these binary issues, and any user can save and
> share one pretty easily.
>
> >  * In your opinion, would the plugin developers be willing to build
> > and upload plugins themselves? If not, could there be concerns if we
> > upload plugins ourselves, of course giving the credit for authors and
> > linking to their project pages?
>
> You're legally free to do whatever the licenses say you are, but sure,
> without halfway decent credit and links to upstream projects and such
> you'll generate a ton of bad will.
>
> The trouble with uploading builds is that doing builds appropriate for
> binary distribution, especially on Linux, is hard.  If you provide
> tooling of some sort that makes this easy and hard to screw up (e.g. a
> standard toolchain, verifying that things aren't linked to some shared
> library that might not be present, etc), that would be useful to
> developers.
>
> Otherwise, it's effectively just another place that one could upload
> something, after doing a bunch of work (that they're probably not doing
> already)?  That means an incentive is probably needed to make anyone
> particularly care.  If there's a wider userbase, and some kind of
> financial incentive like a donation system or whatever, I imagine that
> would provide some incentive for many, but everyone's different.  Some
> people are into providing portable binaries in general, some are happy
> with releasing source code that makes its way into traditional
> distributions, some don't care at all.  Some care about a wider
> userbase and/or better direct communication with the userbase, some not
> at all.  Some wish they could make some money off of their plugin work,
> some not at all.  Some care about Windows and MacOS, some not at all
> (or are actively hostile to the idea), etc.
>
> Your uploader tool, patchstorage-lv2-uploader, has "Tested on Windows
> only" in its README, which is... not a good look.  Meanwhile, the
> builder tool requires a "Linux or Mac OS" based computer.  That also
> seems to be a huge meta-project of vendored things, without any clear
> instructions on how one might build their own plugin, if this is even
> possible.  I think if you want people to upload binaries, it has to be
> as simple as possible and very clear how to do so.
>
> >  * Regarding builds and targets - we have quite clear requirements
> > for the MOD stack projects, and currently, the builder supports
> > x86_64, raspberrypi3_armv8, raspberrypi4_aarch64 platforms. Having
> > said that, Patchstorage could support a different packaging option
> > for other targets as well. From your experience, is it practically
> > feasible to provide packaged plugins built for different
> > targets/platforms (in single digits) that would cover at least 70% of
> > end-user needs? I am not that familiar with all the Linux packaging
> > and dependencies nuances and don’t know what architecture and Linux
> > distro combinations are the most popular.
>
> The only way to distribute binary plugins that are likely to work
> across various Linux systems is to vendor and/or statically link nearly
> - but not quite - everything.  Even then, libc incompatibilities and
> such can get you.  Lignux is a notoriously awful platform for
> distributing binaries, but the constrained scope of plugins means you
> can pull it off.  It takes some work and know-how, though, and the
> default build you get out of whatever build system on whatever
> distribution won't do it.
>
> Architecture-wise, x64, arm32, and aarch64 certainly covers well over
> 70% of needs in practice.  LV2 is also used on Windows and MacOS,
> although much less than on Linux (or POSIX in general).
>
> > To sum up, I would like to understand how much effort we should
> > dedicate to Patchstorage and LV2 questions - should we stick to
> > covering just MOD-based-projects needs, and that’s it, or with your
> > help, we could achieve something that would be a great boost for the
> > entire LV2 ecosystem?
>
> The above-mentioned preset idea seems like a much easier thing to
> establish to me, although I don't know if the current site structure
> meshes with that so well since there's a vast number of "projects"
> (plugins) that they could fall under.
>
> Otherwise, the problem of making it easy to provide solid binary builds
> for "all" platforms (and test them somewhat, to at least be sure
> they're likely to load at all) is still just, well... there.  A website
> to upload the results to doesn't seem to do much for most developers
> who don't already have such infrastructure set up.
>
> It would be nice, though, for whatever that's worth.
>
> --
> dr
>
>
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