What's left for a 4.2 release? [core code]

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

Almost 3 years ago, we had a thread titled 
"What's left for a Version 4.0 release?"
It was useful in guiding the long process of readying the 4.0 official
release.  I am hoping that a similar thread will kick off the 4.2
release process.  I'm also hoping that this time it will take less
than a year to complete the process. We'll see.

Here is my evaluation of the state of the code base, and the
collection of bugs/patches/feature-requests on SourceForge.
I've split it into several parts:
   core code
   drivers
   patches
   feature requests

Core code
===========

Summary:
Either the cvs code is very stable, or no one is giving it a workout.
I think it's the former.  Most of the recent bug reports against the
cvs version have turned out to be old problems that date back to 
3.7 or earlier.  The only major sore point that I see is the
clipping code. More on that later.

Issues:

 - How many of the new options should be enabled by default?
   Should any of them continue to be marked EXPERIMENTAL?

 - Can we confirm that the code builds and runs on amiga?  VMS?
   If it doesn't even build, do we try to fix it or do we just stop
   claiming to support those platforms?

 - The binary file code is ugly, ugly, ugly.  But it works.
   If we hold up a release until all the code is beautiful, it will
   never happen.

 - Feature requests, patches
   I've started a separate thread for these.

Known bugs:

 - Clipping, particularly of arrows and filled polygons, is still
   not done cleanly and therefore some terminals crash on reasonable
   input.  
   This is the only known bug that I consider release-critical.

 - Treatment of "missing" data as opposed to "invalid" data.
   I think this is more a matter of poor documentation than an actual
   bug, but I could be wrong.  In any event, it's not fixable until
   someone can point to an unambiguous statement of what *should*
   happen in both cases, and a reproducible example that doesn't act
   that way. SF bugs #775810 #918793 #969322 #1403945

 - Miscellaneous open bug reports on SourceForge are related to
   the core code rather than to individual terminals.
   The list is actually quite short:

   #1408955        ytics have wrong date with ydata time and "using 2"
   #1363641        dgrid3d / xrange interaction
   #1346814        cannot unset mxtics for time data
   #1184989        set key below noautotitles; plot x -- crash
   #1182499        set terminal doesn't automatically close output
   #1158281        plotting a ternary function with undefined values
   #1107709        plot [-1:1] x is plotted with asymmetric y-axis
   #1058117        Legend Disappears on Some Plots
   #1042785        reversed axis range breaks filled curves
   #1039309        Strange xtics on 'time' plot
   #1024394        bug on time/data format
   #1004754        Tics and grid slightly outside border.
    #992528        `set offset` can break `with filledcurves`
    #634506        plotting a subrange of a contour plot


-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742