Re: gnuplot, wxWidgets and distributions

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

On Sunday 24 September 2006 09:57 am, Timoth=C3=A9e Lecomte wrote:

> I have discussed a little bit about Fedora developpers as I was thinking
> about the way gnuplot 4.2 and the wxWidgets terminal would be=20
> distributed. It seems to raise quite a bit of questioning.

I don't have any real solutions to this issue.  But I can point out that
Redhat has been shipping a minimally-configured and stripped down gnuplot
package for a long time.  The current Redhat gnuplot rpm does not even=20
link against libgd, thus they fail to include support for any of the=20
gd-based terminals.=20

> I won't talk about other distributions, but the situation is probably=20
> quite close to Fedora's.

Not really.  For one thing, the move is in general towards distributing
as a single DVD image rather than multiple CD images.  And at least in
the case of Mandriva, which is where I have the most familiarity, there
is no such distinction between 'core' and 'extra'.
=20
> The other alternatives are:
> - static linking with wxWidgets. No, it's not possible. Fedora forbids it.
> - write a plugin interface to gnuplot, so that the wxWidgets is=20
>   dynamically loadable and can be distributed separately (in Extras).
>=20
> What do you think about that ?

You left out the most obvious option, which is in fact the one you have
to use today to get a decent version of gnuplot going under either RHEL
or Fedora:

    rpmbuild --rebuild gd-2.0.33-2.src.rpm
    rpmbuild --rebuild gnuplot-4.0.0-11.src.rpm

I find that in general the default packages and configuration on
both RHEL and Fedora are not ideal for scientific lab use.  Both
Suse and Mandriva are a better match out-of-the-box.  This comment
is not intended as a slam against Redhat;  they have identified a
target user community and designed their offerings accordingly.
But labs like mine are apparently not in their target community,
and the choices they make are often contrary to our needs.

The truth is that we don't really know who exactly is the core user
community for gnuplot. But at least among the developers it seems that
scientific lab use predominates, and in my experience this means that
=46edora core may not be as common as other linux distros.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742