From: Alan W. I. <ir...@be...> - 2002-11-07 06:28:17
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On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Geoffrey Furnish wrote: > I am ambivalent to which is the default, but I do feel strongly that > sstatic builds should work. Agreed. But all in good time for the release. However, because the current cvs head works (at least for particular combinations of configuration options under linux) static drivers are somewhat down the list of my priorities at the moment. Here is my "library" issue list prioritized from high to low. (1) AT (autotools). This is going to take some time for me to learn plus some time for me to implement. But once Linux with shared libraries and dynamic drivers works with AT to everybody's satisfaction, then the changes to make static drivers work, static libraries work, and to support other Unix platforms should be quite straightforward compared to the current configuration system. (2) I think some more work simplifying libplplottcltk may be in order. If I recall correctly, Joao mentioned some modules that were simply used for one executable so he advocated keeping those *.o files outside of any library and simply linking them on the command line. I don't know whether that is a bad or good idea, but it needs more discussion. I am looking for a volunteer to implement it if the consensus is this is a good idea. This can be done with the present shared library, dyn driver system or it can wait until after AT. (3) Separate out the language interface stuff (e.g., java, fortran) that currently is is mixed in with the plotting API in libplplot. Again I need a volunteer, and this can be done before or after AT. For production use before the next release, 5.1.0 is quite capable, and CVS HEAD does work under Linux (I hope to prove that tomorrow for Geoffrey....;-)). Thus, I have felt fairly relaxed about not being able to contribute much in the last two months to make some progress on the above library issues. And I realize the rest of you are under time constraints as well. But the goal before the next release is library linking that works much better than any previous release. I think we are already pretty much there on Linux for the specific case of shared libraries and dynamic devices. But to add all the bells and whistles like static devices or libraries and to make it work cross platform is going to take quite an additional effort. We will get there sooner or later depending on how many volunteers help, and at that point we will release. Alan |