Re: [Plplot-devel] Aquaterm driver (OS X)

[Per P. <per...@ma...>]

On Thursday, October 9, 2003, at 01:53 AM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> On 2003-10-08 23:42+0200 Per Persson wrote:
>
>> I've got a driver up and running, producing nice plots. It is
>> incomplete and needs improvement, but it is a starting point.
>> I'm hoping that we could get build support for aquaterm into PLplot 
>> and
>> I'll provide a basic driver as a starting point.
>> Hopefully this would get more more attention to PLplot from OS X users
>> and subsequently more people to provide feedback and improvements.
>
> Sounds good to me.
>
> Per, if you hear no strenous objections on the list in the next little
> while, then I think you can take it as read we would accept your 
> driver code
> donation under our usual license (LGPL).

Excellent! The original PLplot driver was contributed by Mark Franz 
based on my driver for PGPLOT, and has a BSD licence.
If you require LGPL thats ok with me, but I'd prefer it remains 
BSD-licenced in the aquaterm sources.

> Assuming you agree with that
> donation idea, then once you have it working reasonably well with our
> experimental tarball just send me a patch between a freshly unpacked 
> tarball
> tree and your modified tree.

Will do! As I've said before, I'm not familiar with PLplot, and hence 
totally in the hands of whatever documentation I can find...
However, Aquaterm was designed with _exactly_ this sort of application 
in mind, so someone familiar with PLplot should easily be able to 
fix/extend the driver once it is available.

>   I would be willing to handle the autotools
> configuration part.

Great, I don't mind helping out, but it helps if someone familiar with 
the sources take the lead!

>   For the drivers/Makefile.am changes, I would need to
> know what macosx libraries need to be mentioned when you link the code 
> on
> Mac OS X.

Besides libaqt (which is not yet released) we need to link against the 
Foundation framework (using the flag: -framework Foundation).
A framework is an aggregation of libraries, headers and documentation. 
I don't think libtool supports frameworks yet, but AFAIK support is 
underway.
The only gotcha is that -framework Foundation must be the last item on 
the link line.
There is also a slight possibility that I'll turn libaqt into a 
framework, but that doesn't change anything fundamental.

I'll hopefully have a beta-version of everything ready by the end of 
next week, so this discussion is proably better deferred until then.

>
> From the autotools configuration point of view, I assume we would 
> enable the
> aquaterm driver just for the macosx case in complete analogy with the 
> way we
> treat the linuxvga driver for the linux-only case.  Rafael, do you 
> agree
> this is the right approach?

There is a theoretical possibility that I'll port Aquaterm to GNUStep 
some day, but presently Aquaterm runs only on OS X so that approach is 
fine with me.

I'll be back...
/Per