Re: "gnuplot development" page on the revised SourceForge layout

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

Ethan A Merritt wrote:
> On Thursday 12 January 2006 06:54 am, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:
>>Ethan A Merritt wrote:

>>>This seems misleading to me.  There is no
>>>32-bit restriction in the code, 

>>No intentional one, sure.  But as a matter of fact the 16-bit builds 
>>haven't worked for quite a while now

> Heh. I wasn't even thinking of 16-bit.
> To me it read like a warning that the code wasn't 64-bit safe.

Well, since there's no heading for 64-bit Windows, nor for "all MS 
Windows" in SF.net's project categorization system, I don't think that 
can readily be helped.

>>>and the focus is not on MS Windows no matter how you look at it.

>>Ours isn't, but if you look at what the users have "voted with their 
>>feet", their message is quite clear:  The win32 binary packages have 
>>seen about as many downloads as the source and all other binary packages 
>>combined.

> I question that interpretation of the download stats.
> Downloading a binary is about the only way Windows users can get the
> package at all. 

Only if one equates "Windows users" with "computer illiterates" --- 
which may have dangerously much truth to it, but still isn't exactly 
true ;-)  It's not exactly rocket science to build gnuplot on Windows. 
  It's just a little uncomfortable having to find and install all those 
libraries first.

Right now the expected roadblock for Win32 builds would be the 
considerable mismatch between the way Boutell packages his Win32 GD 
binary distribution, and our pre-built makefiles.  None of our prepared 
makefiles or configure scripts expects to find GD installed as -lbgd, 
with all the underlying libraries (freetype, jpeg, png, ...?) swallowed 
into that 3 MB blob of a DLL.

> Really the only people who need to
> download from SourceForge are the ones interested in building the cvs
> version.

Ahem... CVS users don't show up in any of those download stats.  We're 
talking here about downloads of a 4.0.0 release source tarball vs. those 
of Win32 binaries made from it.