Re: gnuplot needs more developers/administrators

[Petr M. <mi...@ph...>]

Yes, here it works in such a way that someone wishing to push his feature 
into gnuplot is becoming a developer... and that one with many patches has a 
right to cvs ... Daniel, just you haven't wished so.

> -few people have CVS commit rights

For pushing a feature, from time to time we "ask" on this mailing list what 
to submit now from the Patches. So someone must be active to push...

> -gnuplot isn't eye-candy, so it doesn't make the crowd crazy. The target 
> audience is quite heavily restricted to scientists, programmers and 
> system administrators. In the scientists part, those who may be 
> interested in gnuplot are those who aren't afraid of the command-line, 
> those who are used to program or to use a shell, and those who are not 
> addicted to Matlab but to LateX. Programmers and sysadmins tend to use 
> gnuplot to plot stats and profiles, gnuplot is probably well suited for 
> those people. All in all, I think gnuplot has a small target audience, 

I've just came from a crystallography workshop ... there I was surprised by 
an acknowledgment to gnuplot by one speaker. When asked, she said her boss 
convinced her to use gnuplot and he was right :-)

> -apart from the regular command-line use case, gnuplot architecture 

gnuplot is just for fast drawing

> -gnuplot license discourages new contributors

some people don't care too much -- if they like the project, they help


> -contact identified contributors/rewrite parts of gnuplot to change the 
> license, to something reasonable (core LGPL, frontend GPL). This is a 
> huge lot of work, but that would definitely worth it. As far as 

I don't see any benefit of rewriting gnuplot.


BTW, what could be done, is to write down a project subject, and submit it 
for a bachelor thesis for an informatics student. (Well, most of them have 
never drawn any graph from data...)

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PM