[Plplot-devel] Should we support NOBRAINDEAD or remove it?

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

This came up in private discussions with Rafael, and we thought we should
get the list involved in the discussion.

Alan:

> "NOBRAINDEAD appears in a number of places in the source tree, but it is
essentially totally unsupported in configure.ac and sysloc.in."

Rafael:

> "The Right Way (TM) of doing this is by adding an
AC_DEFINE(NOBRAINDEAD,...) to configure.ac and having its value being
controlled by a configure option like --enable-nobraindead.  The current
situation is not satisfactory, since plConfig.h.in (which is CVS controlled)
must be edited to change this #define.  We could issue a *_big_* warning if
the user specify that switch."

My first tendency is to say just leave it in its current
(unsupported-by-autotools) state since it is such an exotic option that is
rarely used (never by me, for example).  However, I agree with Rafael's
implicit point, that having half-supported options around like this can be
nothing but a pain for future maintenance/understanding of what is going on
with NOBRAINDEAD.

I am willing to make the changes (essentially following what is done for the
with_freetype logic) if the rest of the list feel this is worthwhile. Or
would it be better to remove NOBRAINDEAD completely from the source tree.
Has anybody actually used it in the last 5 years?

Alan