[Plplot-devel] New test run on Debian woody

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Starting from scratch on a new disk (so I could preserve my old Debian
potato distribution) I have installed a Debian woody distribution including
all the development tools.  For those that don't know woody is the testing
distribution which should turn into the stable distribution within a few
months after all the major bugs have been squashed.  But it is stable enough
for my needs [in fact no obvious problems for a week now] so I am going with
it. I can now dual-boot between potato and woody, but it is so nice to work
with the most recent versions of everything that I haven't booted potato
for a week.  (Incidentally, anti-aliasing of fonts works essentially out of
the box with KDE-2.2.1 [which I compiled for myself] and xfree86-4.1.0.  I
simply changed one configuration parameter for the QT 2.3.1 library build in
expectation that a lot more would have to be done to get AA working, but
instead I got a most pleasant surprise the next time I opened up my KDE
desktop.  AA looks wonderful!)

To get to the plplot story, I bugfixed lib_sh_linux.in (the c++ example
could not possibly build without this fix), and also changed sysloc.in so
that tcl8.3 and python2.0 would be found easier.  python2.0 just made it
into woody last week so my earlier comments about being stuck with python1.5
for the forseeable future no longer apply.  Also, tcl8.3 is a considerable
advance on tcl8.1 that was available to me in potato.

After these changes

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/plplot --with-double

worked fine to give me everything except for only two configure "no" results
at the end; java (because I don't have it on my system, sorry Geoffrey) and
gnome (because it is not enabled by default and nobody has worked on it
recently).

make had some warnings (which may require further investigation) but no errors
and similarly for make install so I went ahead with running all the
non-interactive postscript examples in
/usr/local/plplot/lib/plplot5.0.4/examples/

Some problems did show up for my new woody environment:

(1) The python xw??.py scripts didn't work out of the box because Debian
woody calls the command python2 to distinguish it from the python-1.5
command which is still called python.  I tried alias so that executing
python interactively actually did execute python2, but /bin/env python
ignores the alias, and gets the old version.  (Numeric is not installed for
that old version so it makes a mess.) The only way out I could see was to
locally (not in cvs) edit all the xw??.py scripts to change the reference in
the first line from python to python2.  I don't see any easy way around this
name change. Unless somebody has a suggestion for an easy fix, I think we
should write this off as a temporary Debian woody peculiarity which will
eventually get fixed, and not make any changes to plplot.  This is
something, however, that Rafael will have to deal with as the woody packager
of plplot.

(2) Another python problem was that the plcont calls in xw09.py produce a
segfault. I doubt this is a Numeric problem since all my other high-level
Numeric code in the examples seems to work fine.  Also, getting plcont to
work at all under potato conditions was quite tricky (and perhaps even
magical since it seemed to start working for me after the most trivial
change way back when) so it might be true that there has always been a
problem with the plcont code in plmodules.so, and under the new woody
environment the problem is not covered up so well.

(3) All the octave colours were weak.  I did not notice that problem when I
last ran a test (under the old version of octave in potato).  Do you get
this problem also, Joao?  Note my version of octave is now 2.0.  octave 2.1
is currently in unstable and may get into woody soon.

(4) x19c continues not to work in the new plplot environment.  The 3rd map
page continues to be messed up.  Andrew, I am hoping that your map interest
will motivate you to squash this bug....;-)

The upside of this comprehensive test is every other non-interactive demo
(including the tcl ones and the remainder of the python ones, once I had
edited the scripts to call python2) worked fine and produced identical
results to before.  So fundamentally the new (to me) python2 and tcl8.3 are
working fine with the latest plplot.

So I am fairly happy both with the latest plplot from cvs HEAD and woody. I
intend to go back to potato only if there is some emergency.  Same is true
of plplot 5.0.4.

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6
__________________________

Linux-powered astrophysics
__________________________