What's left for a 4.2 release?

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

On Wednesday 07 June 2006 09:31 pm, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
> Here is a message from the octave mailing list kindly asking for a
> gnuplot release mainly for the image code.
> Any update on the remaining work, compared to Ethan's previous review?

Update 8 June 2006
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So far as I am concerned, there are 4-5 patches highlighted below
that should go into CVS more or less immediately, at which point we
can freeze the codebase for a 4.1 release.  But it's not my call.


I'm not going to include a full rundown of every outstanding entry
on SourceForge, since most have not changed.  Here's a brief
summary:


=46eature Requests
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Two new ones since my original posting.
#1117724 should be trivial once we have the GPVAL_* scheme
of user variables. The others are hardly critical
  #1486690  	   timefmt does not support fractions of seconds
  #1480115   	  images with transparency in plot
  #1376595         Class and name strings of X Window
=3D>#1117724         [fit] access to resulting chisquare
  #1078852         Flexible use of geographic coordinates (ex. DD:MM:SS)
  #674055          mouse coordinate read-out in multiplot mode


Core code
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>Known bugs:
>
>- Clipping, particularly of arrows and filled polygons, is still
>  not done cleanly and some terminals crash on reasonable input. =20
>  This is the only known bug that I consider release-critical.

   Now fixed (so far as I know) except for external library errors
   (gd, pdf) and possible some corner cases of large symbols drawn
   very near the edge of the plot.  I don't have an example of this,
   but it seems to me that the core code does not protect against it.

> - 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

   No change

> - Miscellaneous open bug reports on SourceForge
>    #1408955        ytics have wrong date with ydata time and "using 2"
>    #1363641        dgrid3d / xrange interaction
>    #1158281        plotting a ternary function with undefined values
>    #1107709        plot [-1:1] x is plotted with asymmetric y-axis
>    #1042785        reversed axis range breaks filled curves
>    #1039309        Strange xtics on 'time' plot
>    #1004754        Tics and grid slightly outside border.
>     #992528        `set offset` can break `with filledcurves`
>     #634506        plotting a subrange of a contour plot

    No change. Nothing here is critical

Patchsets
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Nothing left on my original "must-do" list.
A few still may still be open for discussion.

>  #1218873         Change text rotating angle from int to float
    Hans-Bernhard doesn't like this one, so I've dropped it from=20
    the list
>  #1244775         Isolines optional on datafile splots
>  #1199186         strftime and strptime
>  #1077726         true depth ordering for pm3d plots
    These remain on my "OK, but only if someone else does the work"
    list

New ones added since the original list. The ones below should go
into CVS as soon as possible

=3D>   #1488448  	  User-available GPVAL_ variables
=3D>   #1461275  	  Japanese translation of faq.tex
=3D>   #1460418     Japanese Manuals
=3D>   #1497957  	  make built-in function defined() match docs

   These two also sound reasonable, but I haven't really looked at
   them in detail so I don't have an opinion

   #1499728  	  revamped stat.inc
   #1445064  	  Gnuplot fitting improvements

Drivers
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wxt is in CVS and working.  Some things could be polished or
extended, but I have no trouble with releasing it as-is.

We've been trading patches and proposals back and forth
about hot-key processing (<space> and <q> typed into an
interactive plot window).  But I don't think this issue is
release-critical.

There are two contributions of preliminary new drivers:
   #1398474  	  a driver for GD.pm
   #1463191  	  First port.trm
And Email but no actual patchsets from Mojca Miklavec=20
<moj...@gm...> requesting inclusion of
another TeX variant.  I have seen no discussion or feedback
on any of these, so I have no idea how well they work or if
they are worth polishing for inclusion in CVS.  But they are
IMHO, not release-critical.

>> forwarded from Octave list
> I am very interested in this, but this is where I'm a little
> frustrated with gnuplot's slow release cycles. I would be willing to
> work on patches for octave, but I wouldn't expect John to apply
> patches until a 4.1 release is widely available in the distributions,
> and I don't really want to maintain patches to a source tree that
> will be changing in the meantime. Do any of the gnuplot insiders on
> the list here know how soon we might expect a release?
>
> Quentin

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Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA