Prescaling fit parameters

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

Hi,

A couple of years ago (March 2011) I submitted a very small patch against fit.c 
to improve the way gnuplot's fit function works in cases where fit parameters 
vary in size dramatically. The problem is that if you are doing fits where some 
parameters are, say 10^7, but others are 10^-7, the fit routine basically 
collapses.

The patch does a trivial rescaling of the parameters by their initial guess 
values before the meat of the fitting routine is called. With this rescaling 
these cases don't cause any problems.

The patch and a description are here:
http://sourceforge.net/p/gnuplot/patches/507/
and this still applies cleanly to gnuplot 4.6.

After applying this patch, most of the examples in fit.dem actually converge in 
fewer iterations than without it.

Is there any hope of having this tiny patch (it touches a total of 20 lines) 
accepted?

Thanks,

Carl