#427 Ensuring that demos may be processed anywhere

[Dr. Ing. Dieter Jurzitza]

Starting "all.dem" i. e. in / or in /usr causes failures because some of the demos write temporary files into CWD. This is not permitted for ordinary users in /.
Hence it makes sense to write anything that is for logging purposes only into /tmp (or accrindingly into C:\temp, whatever would be appropriate).
The following patch cures this behaviour on anything that is unix-like at least.

[Dr. Ing. Dieter Jurzitza]

Fixing target directory for log- and temporary files

[Ethan Merritt]

It's a good idea, and for the files named *.tmp it is probably the right thing to do. But unfortunately there are some problems with this approach for other files.

For example, the files named *.dat are supposed to be present in the same directory as the *.dem files, because they are used in multiple demos. They are only re-created if they do not already exist. So creating them in /tmp is the wrong solution. Instead they should be created as part of the gnuplot installation process, and indeed they are if you run "make check".

For files other than *.tmp or *.dat, perhaps the best thing to do would be to skip the demo altogether, with a suitable warning message, if the current directory is not writeable?

[Ethan Merritt]

In preparation for eventual release of gnuplot version 4.4, existing bugs and patchsets are being re-prioritized.

I have chosen to use the following categories

9 - should be included in 4.4.rc1 if possible
7 - looks reasonable to me, but not high priority for 4.4.rc1
5 - default priority for newly submitted patches
2 - not under active consideration

These are my personal ratings. If you want to argue for a different priority on one or more patches - go right ahead.

Ethan Merritt (sfeam)