I've been building pretty complex patches for quite some time, projects that require a lot of components and and forward planning.

It's been a consistent issue for me keeping a tidy management of files and version development and has held me back greatly from sharing my work.

I've been in and out of trying to understand GIT in the context of puredata, I don't know if i'm looking at the problem wrong or somethings just not clicking but I figured i'd share my issue here see if anyone has a good solution to managing projects in puredata.

I'd really like to share my work more here, I've been sitting on work for nearly a decade now and I've reinvented wheels far too many times because my projects become unwieldily and scattered across space and time.

There must be a better way than juggling folders and naming patches "patch_EXTRATHING_0.001-noodlyappendage_OHGODWHEREAMI-V0.9-B.pd"

Git works fine for tracking changes. The diffs are not exactly human comprehensible, but they work -- you can time travel by checking out earlier revisions, even make branches etc.

A potential trouble area is merge conflict resolution, but I believe the general workflow should still be ok: where there is a conflict, inspect the files and integrate changes by hand. The difference is that in a human readable source code file, three-way comparison tools exist to help the process, but there is no such thing for Pd files. You would have to do it in the Pd interface. In any case, all that's really needed is that you (by whatever means) produce a new version that integrates both sets of changes, and then declare the conflict resolved, and then git will let you move on.

You might be overthinking here...? Pd files are text files, so git can track them.

hjh

+1 for git
If you better like GUI I recommend Git-Cola.
That's what a git history for a pd file can look : https://github.com/FlachyJoe/FCPDWorkbench/blame/main/pure-data/pdlib/fc_client.pd

NB : pd files are quite touchy with cosmetics as object move and reorder (delete and recreate or cut/paste) change the text source without change for algorithm.