[Plplot-general] Welcome to the new era of PLplot!

[Geoffrey F. <fu...@ac...>]

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to the new era of PLplot!

With many apologies to all for the extreme delays that have been
incurred over the past months, it gives me great pleasure to be able
at this time, to finally provide details of the reorganization of the
PLplot project.

As most of you know, PLplot was hosted at dino.ph.utexas.edu during
the time that Maurice and I were employed at the Institute for Fusion
Studies, at the University of Texas at Austin.  dino continued as the
host for PLplot after we each moved on, but we were searching for a
suitable place to relocate the project.  As I am sure you all know,
the open source software movement has gained a lot of steam in recent
times, and there were a number of organizations willing to host
PLplot.  Of course we deeply appreciate the offers of sponsorship
tendered by all of these organizations.  However, it turned out that
the technical challenges of hosting a project like this, were not fully
appreciated by all such sponsoring agencies.  Curiously, we were a
little hobbled in a sense, by being just a hair ahead of the curve,
and wound up sinking significant amounts of effort into rehosting
PLplot at two sites that ultimately simply didn't have the
sophistication to quite bring the task to closure.

The final resting place, is sourceforge.net, operated by VA Linux.
PLplot now has its own domain, plplot.org, and a variety of services
accessible through this domain.  The domain is hosted by
sourceforge.net.  I will explain the current services available
through this domain below.  If anyone in the user base wants to thank
VA Linux for their sponsorship of the PLplot project, you could send
email to Chris DiBona <ch...@va...> to express your
appreciation.  Our web site will also contain attribution to this
effect, once we get it put together.

Now, on to the list of services provided through plplot.org.

First, the new official web site for PLplot is www.plplot.org.  Randy
is the web master, and will be bringing this up as time permits.  For
starters, he has imported the prior PLplot web site by Noel Gorelick,
and will be expanding from here.

Second, we now export the PLplot CVS repository via anonymous CVS at
cvs.plplot.org.  From now on, anyone will be able to obtain the latest 
version of PLplot using anonymous CVS.  CVS  has become the darling
source control system of the open source movement, and deservedly so.
I won't take the time in this message to attempt to explain this in
detail.  There are other resources on the net, and at sourceforge.net
in particular, which do this job.  The very short story is that you
can do this:
    setenv CVSROOT :pserver:ano...@cv...:/cvsroot/plplot
    cvs login
    <no password required, just hit return>
    cvs co plplot
Once you have done this, you will be able to track ongoing development 
(if you wish) by doing a "cvs update" from time to time.

Third, there will be anonymous ftp as well.  We don't have anything up 
there yet, so information will be forthcoming on this once we finally
put some files up there.  Probably we will put up the same files that
were on dino, providing the historical "releases", and in the future
we may make pacakged tarballs of future releases.  Anyway, more info
on that once there is something concrete to report.

Fourth, there is a new mailing list, "plp...@pl...".  All
subscribers to the old list (pl...@di...) have been
transfered to the new list.  Also, a few people who've sent me email
over the last fewmonths have been added as well (that is, the requests
I could still locate in my inbox :-).  You should've just received a
message from the list manager explaining to you how you can interact
with it.  Sourceforge.net uses "mailman", which is a bit different
from what we used before (majordomo), but there is plenty to like
about mailman if you haven't encountered it before.  Primarily it
interacts with subscribers through a web interface, so you have much
greater personal control over how it interacts with you.  In
particular, I hope that this will finally put an end to the
desperation "get me off this list" problem we were having before.
Please, if you want off, just go the mailman management page, and do
the job!  But you can also use it to control numerous delivery options
including digesting, etc.

One thing that we were not able to do, is to get the old majordomo
mailing list archives, directly imported into the new list manager.
We'll probably put those historic list archives up on the anon ftp
site somewhere so you can still get them if you want.  Anyway, mailing 
list traffic from this point forward /is/ being archived, just not
combined with the old stuff.  Oh well.

Anyway, "plp...@pl..." supercedes the old list.  The old
one is down anyway as everyone probably knows.  The story on that is
that dino actually suffered a cataclysmic hardware failure last fall,
just as we were about to move off to sourceforge.  This resulted in
lost time as we scurried to restore the filesystems, recover the
PLplot cvs repository, etc.  If anybody wants to thank the IFS staffer 
who exerted heroic effort to help us recover from this disaster, you
could send email to Jim Dibble <di...@pe...>, to
express your gratitude.  He worked really hard to help dig us out of
that ditch.

Besides "plp...@pl...", there is also
"plp...@pl...", to which cvs commit messages will be sent
when developers with write access to the repository commit changes.
If you haven't used cvs before, let me just say that these commit
messages are an extremely valuable way to keep abreast of what is
going on in a software development project.  It results in a certain
amount of email, so if that bothers you, you won't want to be on that
list (or you should make sure you have a filtering agent so you can
control the inbound flux to your liking).  But if you just want to
have a very low-overhead way to keep tabs on what is going on, who's
done what when, who's patches have been applied to the repository,
etc, subscribing to plp...@pl... is an excellent idea.  If
you are one of the people who makes occasional patch submissions, you
might want to subscribe at least long enough to watch for when your
changes go in, for example.

Fifth, there is a "project page" at sourceforge.net:
       http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=2915
We will probably have a link to this somewhere on the www.plplot.org
home page.  Anyway, people who are tapped into how sourceforge works,
may find this useful.  Frankly, none of the current developers have a
clue what to do with all this stuff, so we're all learning here, and
will all have to collectively help educate ourselves about how to get
the most value out of this.  Anyway, one thing that is fairly easy to
access from here, is a browsable portal onto the CVS repository,
orchestrated through "CVS Web", modified by sourceforge.net.  There is
lots to explore at sourceforge.net, far more than I am even remotely
aware of or could convey in this message.  We will all have to learn
together how to best exploit this resource for the open source
community.  

Finally, a word about people.  As long time participants on this
mailing list will remember, there has long been a lot of frustration
over the difficulty of getting patches into PLplot.  This has
primarily been a function of the fact that Maurice and I are both out
of the university scene now, holding down real day jobs with real
professional commitments, and simply haven't been able to provide the
bandwidth to support the pace of development of an open source project
like PLplot.  We (and here "we" means the entire PLplot community)
certainly appreciate and have benefited from the valuable
contributions offered by many over the years, but my personal failure
to rapidly incorporate everyone's work, has been a key liability for
the project.  Correcting this critical problem, was one of the primary
goals in seeking a rehosting arrangement for PLplot.

This vision has now FINALLY! been realized.  At this time, there are a 
total of five people with write access to the repository:

myself
Maurice
Alan W. Irwin
James Phillips (randy)
Rafael Laboissiere

Alan and Rafael have been overhauling the documentation of late, and
that will be showing up for public consumption before long.  And Randy 
is picking up the webmaster role.

Exactly how we will deal with inbound patch submissions has not been
fully worked out, but my point here is, at least /I/ am no longer the
bottleneck.  We have a publicly accessible host, we are exporting the
CVS repo through anoncvs, and we have multiple people who can act to
get patches applied.  These are the reasons for regarding this as the
dawn of the new era of PLplot.  I would like to take this chance to
publicly thank Alan, Randy and Rafael for joining Maurice and I in
this capacity, and for both the work they have already done, and will
be doing as we move forward.

it has been a long time in coming (too long), but I hope that all
PLplot users everywhere will share my enthusiasm as we enter the new
millenium with a revitalized PLplot project.

I suppose in closing, it would be good to say some words about what is 
really going on with the software itself.  Curiously, this is the part 
I am least able to address.  And in a strange but real sense, that is
the best part of this message.  I have no idea what is ahead of us.
It really just depends on what the world wide open source developer
community pulls out of their hats (keyboards).

Onward Ho!

-- 
Geoffrey Furnish            Actel Corporation        fu...@ac...
Senior Staff Engineer      955 East Arques Ave       voice: 408-522-7528
Placement & Routing     Sunnyvale, CA   94086-4533   fax:   408-522-8041

"... because only those who write the code truly control the project."
						      -- Jamie Zawinski