Dear Gnuplot maintainers,
we have created Octave.app for PPC 10.3 and i386 10.4 Mac users that can be
downloaded at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2888. One of the last
things that need to be done for Octave.app is to make a ready-to-run binary
release of gnuplot available that can then be taken as the background plotting
engine. That's why we quickly have decided to create another Mac application
that can be set up as easy as Octave.app but is not bundled with Octave.app and
that we call this time: Gnuplot.app.
We nearly have finished building Gnuplot.app PPC and Gnuplot.app i386 with
gnuplot version 4.2 including most features like gdlib, jpg and png (but not
wxWindows because of a size-explosion of the *.dmg image and no pdf-support
because of a missing GPL-compatiple license). We didn't create a universal
binary Gnuplot.app because we don't see a real advantage of universal binaries
for Mac (we already have gone through this whole discussion about universal
binaries or two binaries of Octave.app at one of the mailing lists at octave.org
months ago).
For building either the PPC version or i386 version of Gnuplot.app we have
created a single shell script - it's not very nice but very powerful if we have
a look at the Gnuplot.app result that comes out (and there are also some other
external files that are needed, eg. a 128x128bit gnuplot.icns file, the
.DS_Store file and the corresponding background image...). Some very important
Mac-features of Gnuplot.app (like the ones of Octave.app) are:
- there is no easier way of installation (drag'n drop somewhere)
- and no easier way of deinstallation (drag'n drop into trash)
- it's bundled, no other dependency must be installed (AquaTerm inclusion)
- gnuplot can also be called from the command line of Terminal.app or xterm
The inclusion of AquaTerm into Gnuplot.app has taken a while but we were able to
set it up very nice ;) The user must not install any AquaTerm.pkg anymore, the
necessary AquaTerm.framework is included into Gnuplot.app directly and it is
started automatically if the user plots something the first time to the AquaTerm
backend. There is one problem left ie. that we are not able to compile AquaTerm
"not universal", ie. whatever PPC *or* i386 is set in the projects preferences
in this XCode program of the AquaTerm.project it is not taken for compilation.
It always creates a universal binary (that's not good because SDK 10.4.9u then
must be taken and so we can't create a 10.3 PPC version like we did for
Octave.app PPC). The manual of XCode says: change compiler option ARCH and SDK
in the preferences dialog and you're done ;( If it would be that easy...
Maybe my email hits you like a hammer (I don't hope so) but I wanted to get into
contact with you in a very early stage because you also might have a thousand
questions that need to be answered and I'm also interested in your further
requirements for an official release. And I'd also like to address our interests
that would be that the PPC and the i386 Gnuplot.app could be hosted on your side
of sourceforge.net (because octave.sourceforge.net would not be the right place)
and that somebody could continue working on this topic for future releases of a
Gnuplot.app that understands much more about gnuplot in general than we do. The
problem is that the one or the other might have a special gnuplot-depending
question and I don't know if we do have the knowledge and the time to answer
specific internals...
The build scripts need some more clean-up but I think that I'm able to send it
in a few days (whom? or where?). I can also prepare a PPC *dmg and a i386 *.dmg
for very early alpha-tests (<5MB each *.dmg). Please also reply any comments and
questions directly because I'm not a subscriber to any of your lists. I think
hosting a Gnuplot.app would also be of your interest as there doesn't exist one
at your download site for 4.2 at the moment and so I hope that we can find
together soon...
Thomas
|
