What's left for a 4.2 release? [patches]

[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

Patchsets
=========

Summary:
Although the current collection of patchsets on SourceForge
represents a lot of work by a lot of people, I don't think there
is much there that cries out for inclusion in a 4.2 release.
Here's my attempt at sorting them:

I'm willing to spend time to get it into 4.2
==================================================
1267434         wxWidgets terminal
1218873         Change text rotating angle from int to float
908040          Break PostScript prologue file out of post.trm


Maybe, if someone else does the work :-)
==================================================
1244775         Isolines optional on datafile splots
1199186         strftime and strptime
1077726         true depth ordering for pm3d plots


Good idea, but not for 4.2
==================================================
1252232         Allow UTF-8 input for normal postscript Type1 fonts
1252215         Font kerning in postscript terminal
1143563         Place arbitrary objects in plots
1196485         OpenGL terminal driver
1105717         Add '=' special file to reread '-' inline data


I cannot judge these
=================================================
1398474         a driver for GD.pm
1384525         Small fixes to gd terminals
1294507         Fitting using CERN Minuit routines
1248308         Rexx scripting support
1233137         Font control in tkcanvas
1289725         handling double quotes in gnuplot-mode


Reject for now; revisit later
=============================
My evaluation is that the rest of these should be rejected,
and the core ideas revisited later if there is still a need
after the code destined for 4.2 has settled down.
Note that several of these involve the clipping code,
which I have separately listed as a release-critical issue.
I just don't think that these particular patches are the way
to get there, even though some of them were my own suggestions.

1364114         Extension of Ethans patch: Clipping in Postscript terminal
1356114         set term ... size <foo>,<baz>
1353539         Fix clipping for plots with canvas size != 1,1
1329098         New clipping code
1328103         Fix BoundingBox for large postscript plots
1321476         Draw zeroaxis at specified positions
1318546         Add 'offset' and 'backhead' to 'set arrow'
1262281         Povray terminal driver
1251204         Real 3d perspectivic look to splot
1206823         Boxed text labels
1193448         Use allterm.h for texinfo documentation
1185346         Autoscaling with constraint on final range.
1123355         Support a header file in epslatex terminal
1104264         Fix buggy clipping of arrows in large splots
1052938         Fix incorrect alignment of rotated multiline text
1044573         change density of generated tics
1030055         add user-specified colors to emf.trm
1027032         Connect gnuplot_x11 to exterior application window
1024305         pie graphs (work in progress)
982765          Patch for AI (Adobe Illustrator) term
936695          Some new logos
760421          plot smooth, with set log y
633724          new terminals:Python/Tk and Ruby/Tk
632289          new dgrid3d options: scaling and range
588805          external functions via plugins
551439          plot ... index by name instead of number





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